Verisign has published its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) report for the second quarter of this year. The publication should be considered a record: it took the company less than a month to summarize the results of the quarter, while previously it took about two months. Thus, the current report was separated from the previous one by only two weeks.
However, this is hardly the only achievement that the company has. Company, that manages.COM and .NET, lost 1.8 million registrations between April and June compared to the first quarter. Compared to the same period last year, the decrease was 2.2%, the total number of registrations in the two domain zones as of June 30 is estimated at 170.6 million. And even the registration renewal rate, an indicator that Verisign is rightly proud of, has also decreased. In the second quarter of this year, it was 72.6%, while a year earlier it was 73.4%, and in the first quarter of 2024 - 74.1%. True, new domains and national domain zones did not allow Verisign's failures to push the overall statistics into the negative. Their growth compensated for the decrease in registrations in .COM and .NET, as a result of which the total number of registrations in all generic top-level domains remained unchanged in the second quarter compared to the first - 362.4 million. And compared to the same period last year, the growth was 1.6% or 5.8 million registrations. At the same time, national domains grew slightly - by only 400 thousand names or 0.3% compared to the previous quarter or by 3 million names and by 2.2% against last year's values. The total number of registrations in the second quarter amounted to 140 million in national domain zones.
New domains showed higher growth - 1.3 million registrations against the previous quarter and 6.5 million compared to last year (4.0% and 23.2% respectively). They ended the quarter with 34.4 million names.
As for Verisign, there is one more parameter for which growth was recorded. The company's net income in the second quarter amounted to 199 million dollars, while last year's figure was 186 million. Naturally, the company owes this growth to another increase in prices in the .COM domain. However, as reported by the Domain Incite, Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos, at a meeting with analysts, seemed to admit for the first time that it was precisely the price increase that could be one of the reasons for the decrease in the number of registrations in the domain zone.
However, Bidzos placed the main blame on domain registrars, which, in response to increases from Verisign, raise their prices unreasonably and disproportionately. Bidzos also announced another annual forecast, again adjusted downwards. In February, the company intended to end the year with the number of registrations in the range of +1% to -1% compared to its beginning. Already in April, the range changed and looked like this: from +0.25% to -1.75%. Now it is declared within the range of -2% to -3%. Bidzos added that the company does not expect a return to growth until the second half of 2025.
