ICANN has published a draft budget for the 2025 fiscal year (for many US companies and non-profit organizations it begins on July 1, 2024), according to Domain Incite. ICANN's financiers project that ICANN will receive $89 million in royalties from registration transactions in legacy generic top-level domains. For the current budget year (ending June 30, 2024), this figure is projected to be 88.9 million. For the new generic top-level domains, the expected contribution to the budget will be $10.1 million, compared to $9.9 million expected in the current fiscal year.
These two pairs of numbers alone are enough to understand that ICANN does not expect any serious changes, and the next year in the domain market will not be much different from this year. Which in general so far somehow meets budget expectations. Truth be told, the number of registries (and therefore the volume of fixed payments from them) is declining a little faster than ICANN financiers expected: if the current budget initially assumed that by the end of the fiscal year their number would be 1,127, then in the updated budget forecast this figure was reduced to 1,118 (the number of registries is declining almost exclusively due to companies abandoning their branded domains). On the other hand, this budget gap will likely be filled by registrar contributions, which appear to be larger than ICANN expected. If the budget predicted the existence of 2,447 accredited domain registrars by June 30, now their expected number has been increased to 2,575.
