Verisign announces another .com price increase

webz

Verisign has announced a 7% increase in .com prices to take effect on September 1, 2023. This follows a similar increase announced in 2022. The wholesale price for .com domains will increase from $8.97 currently to $9.59 after the increase and doesn't include ICANN's 18 cent fee. Registrars mark the price up to cover payment processing, technical and support costs, and profit. Under its agreement with ICANN and the U.S. government, Verisign is allowed to increase prices by 7% per year in the last four years of every six-year contract term. This will be the third hike of this contract term, and the company is expected to increase .com prices to $10.26 in 2024.

Enough time to renew your domain at old price

Encoders

assuming MUH PROFIT factor can be ignored, why domain price must be adjusted? is it because inflation? or another cost like electricity or operational cost in general is raising?

MikeA

Public company, gotta keep revenue up for shareholders.

rcy026

@Encoders said:
assuming MUH PROFIT factor can be ignored, why domain price must be adjusted? is it because inflation? or another cost like electricity or operational cost in general is raising?

Inflation affects everything, directly or indirectly.
It is likely that domain names is one of the things people will cut back on when times are tough. Less domain registrations means registrars have to have higher margins to stay profitable, which means they have to increase price.

But, of course, the "we increase prices because we can" factor is not to be overlooked. Which is kind of a catch 22, when some companies raises their prices just because they can, it affects other companies that have to raise their prices, and that in turn affect other companies and so on and so on. This is not a small part of what actually drives inflation, your money is worth less which makes things more expensive which makes companies raise prices which makes things more expensive which makes your money worth less. And repeat.

Encoders

@rcy026 said:
(...)
But, of course, the "we increase prices because we can" factor is not to be overlooked. Which is kind of a catch 22, when some companies raises their prices just because they can, it affects other companies that have to raise their prices, and that in turn affect other companies and so on and so on. This is not a small part of what actually drives inflation, your money is worth less which makes things more expensive which makes companies raise prices which makes things more expensive which makes your money worth less. And repeat.

thank you, this is interesting. .com is the most used domain for now but other extensions are undoubtedly keeps growing (iirc verisign did mention growth decrease before).

Domain.com's price is an interesting piece to look forward to, considering:

• clever names are mostly taken in this particular extension.
• Google is introducing infinity scroll search results in wider coverage (they were A/B testing in the US since 2020, but atm in SEA we already got them too), which is destroying the idea that "hurr this domain name is on page 1 that means it's good for SEO."
• NLP-based "search engines" are easily more accessible; IMO, this could contribute to people caring less about your domain name extension.