Internet Computer Bureau, a UK-based company owned by Identity Digital, which acts as the registry of .IO, a ccTLD assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory, reported its 2023 financial results. Its turnover came in at £29.6 million, or $39.6 million, up 13.9% compared to 2022, when this figure was £26.1 million. Nevertheless, this result still pales in comparison to 2022 when the company reported a 59% surge in its turnover year-on-year. The .IO domain has traditionally enjoyed broad uptake among tech companies due to the fact that I/O means input/output in software development. However, this decelerating trend may be attributable to the emergence of a serious rival in this sector, with .AI, a ccTLD assigned to Anguilla, rapidly gaining ground in this sector.
Nevertheless, the registry has been a success story and deserves credit for its achievements. In fact, when Afilias bought Internet Computer Bureau, a registry, and merged it into its structure seven years ago, it had a turnover of about $7 million and operated some 270,000 domains. While Identity Digital did not reveal .IO’s registration numbers, Domain Incite used renewal pricing for the .IO domain to make a projection and came to the conclusion that the number of registrations in the British Indian Ocean Territory’s ccTLD may be about to reach or has even exceeded one million.
Another important fact is that the Internet Computer Bureau also manages the national domains Ascension Island (.AC) and the islands of Saint Helena and Tristan da Cunha (.SH). That said, the latter two have had much fewer registrations, to put it mildly, and did not report any major increases for 2023. Therefore, it is quite obvious that registrations in the .IO domain accounted for a lion’s share of Internet Computer Bureau’s revenue over the past year.
