The expenses: ICANN’s budget mess

A look at ICANN’s growing expenses.

So far I’ve reviewed ICANN’s swelling expenses at a high level as well as the massive headcount growth at the non-profit domain industry overseer. Now let’s dig a little deeper to look at the costs and how they are growing.

Here’s a chart showing the categorized expenses dating back to FY 2008:

This chart ought to say a thousand words.

There’s a slow and steady increase in expenses over time. Then there’s a huge bump in everything in 2013, surely due to fresh top level domains.

Professional services costs drop following the initial onslaught of fresh TLD work but continue to be 2x what they were ahead of fresh TLD applications. Personnel and Administration continue their upward march even following the initial surge of fresh TLD work is done. Travel continues to be a major expense at $19 million last fiscal year.

In my next post I’ll summarize what I think has gone wrong and what ought to be done regarding it.