Base grew by 1.91 million names last quarter — VeriSign’s domain
Historically strong Q1 delivers for Verisign.
VeriSign (NASDAQ:VRSN) noted first quarter 2018 earnings following the bell yesterday.
The base of .com and .net domain names grew by 1.91 million during the quarter and 9.6 million fresh .com and .net domains were registered. This comes in toward the high end of Verisign’s predicted range of 1.5 million to 2.0 million net adds. Historically, Q1 is the strongest quarter for domain name registrations.
There were 9.0 million fresh registrations in Q4 2017 and 0.57 million net adds.
Verisign forecasts 0.7 million to 1.2 million net adds in Q2 2018.
On the investor conference call yesterday, Verisign stated that it continues to work with the NTIA on the cooperative agreement, which expires in November this year. The NTIA has the option of extending the agreement or sunsetting it. For everyone in the domain industry, you ought to hope that the NTIA extends it. Remember, it was the NTIA that kept .com prices down in the 2012 contract renewal, not ICANN.
