New registrations and renewal rate dip.
Verisign reported first quarter earnings today after the bell. The company reported revenue of $249 million, a 5% increase from the first quarter of 2013.
The company added 1.28 million net new names during the first quarter to .com and .net, ending the quarter with 128.5 million active domain names in the zone.
Some other metrics weren’t as rosy.
Verisign processed 8.6 million new domain name registrations for .com and .net last quarter. That’s below the 8.8 million number in the same period in 2013.
The final renewal rate from Q4 2013 also dipped. The renewal rate was 72.2 percent compared with 72.9 percent Q4 2012.
I suspect the company will blame changes in monetization on its conference call this afternoon. A bigger question going forward is if new top level domain names can siphon off some of those 8.6 million quarterly registration.
Joseph Peterson says
There are dips, and there are dips.
Readers who are only skimming this article should bear in mind that we’re not talking about any decline in the absolute number of .COM / .NET domains registered. Rather, we’re looking at a continued growth rate that has slowed (for one quarter) by a minuscule amount.
8.6 million compared to 8.8 million –> 0.2 / 8.8 = a dip of 2.27%
72.2% renewals compared to 72.9% renewals –> 72.2 / 72.9 = a dip of 0.99%
According to these numbers, .COM / .NET are moving forward fast — 8.6 million new registrations per quarter. There’s just enough of a headwind to have slowed them from 8,800,000 miles per hour to 8,600,000.
Honestly, I’d expect the upward slope to continue upward but slow further than this due to the nTLDs. At this stage, though, the numbers are very robust. If I were Verisign, I’d be boasting about them.
rob says
this article perfectly sums up the big con of modern times.
every quarter (or whatever reporting period) we have come to expect, or should i say have been trained to expect, ever increasing growth. for those who aren’t very good at mathematics, this is called exponential growth. google it if you don’t understand what it means and its implications. exponential growth is clearly impossible to achieve and not sustainable and it is not something we should be looking at, be it for domains, the economy, or anything really.
so when we look again at the figures, the net number of registrations was positive and not negative, so this means people are still registering new .coms. so what if it was less in number than one year ago – sometimes it’s higher and sometimes it’s lower. the figures still look solid imo.
NameYouNeed says
This is a simple short news story. I don’t think Andrew is trying to make any commentary about the numbers.
rob says
oh no, i wasn’t suggesting that andrew was putting his personal views forward about the numbers.
i was just pointing out how we tend to (mis)interpret those numbers sometimes, eg: “Some other metrics weren’t as rosy.”
we are conditioned to think that anything less than a growth in numbers/dollars is bad news.