Verisign summed up the financial results of the Q3 last Friday. Registry revenue for the three months was $357 million, up 6.8% year-over-year. As the Domain Name Wire notes, the strong financial results were achieved largely due to the increase in the cost of domain name registration and its renewal by 7% since September 1 of this year.
If we talk about the number of registrations, then the situation looks rather alarming. The number of registrations in domain zones managed by Verisign amounted to 174.2 million as of September 30. This is 1.2% more than in the same period last year. However, this is almost 160 thousand registrations less than was recorded at the end of the previous quarter. Thus, for the second quarter in a row, the .COM and .NET domain zones show a decrease - the situation, to put it mildly, is not quite usual.
Difficulties are also evident to Verisign management: the company has lowered its annual growth forecast for the second time since the beginning of the year. Initially, Verisign analysts predicted annual growth ranging from 2.5% to 4.5%. Then this forecast was reduced to 0.5% - 1.5%. Now the company is targeting annual growth in the range of 0.25% - 1.0%. The inevitable decline that replaced the rapid growth of registrations during the pandemic and the restrictions caused by it, the decrease in the activity of the Chinese market and the instability of the situation in the global economy are called as explanations for the situation.
