Verisign shared the results of its work in the first quarter of 2022 and expectations for the year as a whole. The results, as usual, pleased shareholders: the company's total revenue for the first three months of this year amounted to $347 million, up 7% over the same period last year. Domain Incite, reporting this news, notes that the cost of registering domain names in the .COM zone managed by Verisign increased by 7% last year. The total number of registrations in the .COM and .NET domain zones increased by 4% compared to the first quarter of last year and reached 174.7 million. And the registration renewal rate rose from 73.5% to 74.48%.
But the forecasts were not so optimistic. Previously, Verisign analysts believed that the total increase in the number of registrations in domain zones under the company's management would be from 2.5 to 4.5% by the end of the year. Now this forecast has been adjusted downwards, the new figures are from 1.75% to 3.5%. The head of the company, Jim Bidzos, cited two factors that contributed to the deterioration of the forecast. The first is to ease the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. At its first stages, strict quarantine restrictions stimulated small and medium-sized businesses to transfer their activity to the Internet, which led to a rapid growth in the number of domain names. Now this factor almost does not work: both vaccination campaigns and a certain decline in the pandemic have affected. Bidzos called the second factor the general deterioration of the economic situation in the world, caused both by the consequences of the pandemic, and by a number of other reasons that the head of Verisign did not specify.
