ICANN has recently published its FY21 draft budget. The document shows that the corporation plans to bring in $140.4 million, which is slightly more than has been budgeted for 2020 ($140.1 million). At the same time, the corporation expects a decrease in revenue from the new gTLD sector.
One of ICANN’s income sources is a gTLD registry transaction fee of $0.25 (registration, renewal or transfer). In 2020, the corporation expects to receive $5.5 million from new domains for these operations, while the FY21 budget forecasts only $5.1 million. Another source of income is fixed annual payments to ICANN’s budget from new gTLD registries amounting to $25,000. In this regard, ICANN believes it will lose seven new domains in FY21. Most likely, the corporation expects companies to continue abandoning dot-brand gTLDs. The number of such “abandoned” domains has already reached 69.
Domain registrars also contribute to ICANN’s budget. But the expected income from their contributions to the FY21 budget has also dropped – $9.6 million compared to $10.7 million in 2020. This means that the corporation predicts that the number of accredited registrars will fall by about 100. Summarizing all this information, Domain Incite sarcastically concludes that “it’s not a particularly rosy outlook for the gTLD industry, unless you’re Verisign.” (Verisign manages .COM.)
