Verisign notes slowing growth, hikes .Net prices 10%
.Com base inches forward, .Net prices are increasing.
Verisign noted earnings following the bell today, and the results for .com/.net aren’t that promising.
It gets harder to grow something as it gets bigger, but net adds across these two domain names slowed by quite a bit.
Verisign noted just 0.42 million net fresh ads during the second quarter. Last year in the same quarter it added 1.2 million domain names.
The good news for Verisign is that fresh registrations of .com and .net remain fairly strong. 8.5 million fresh .com/.net domain names were registered last quarter, compared to 8.7 million for the same quarter last year.
The number is down, but not by that much. The firm predicts a rebound in Q3.
Even better, Verisign is invoking its allowed price hike on .net domain names. The price will jump from $6.18 to $6.79 on February 1, 2015.
Who needs to grow the zone when you can just increase prices 10% a year?
Verisign used to be able to do that with .com, too. The U.S. government stepped in to put a halt to that.
