Verisign has announced that it plans to increase the prices of .com domains yet again in 2023, despite seeing a decline in its overall domains under management. The company's revenue saw a slight increase, even though renewals and domain numbers decreased.



The number of .com and .net domain registrations only increased by 0.2% by the end of 2022, compared to last year's forecasted growth of between 2.5% and 4.5%. Verisign expects a modest growth rate of no more than 2.5% for the coming year.

While CEO Jim Bidzos attributes Verisign's poor performance to post-pandemic effects and China volatility, the company still reported a net income of $674 million in 2022. Despite this, annual revenue was only up 7.3%, slightly less than the 7% .com price increase enforced in the same year.

Verisign is expected to raise prices again in September, increasing from $8.97 to $9.59 per year. Although the company's domains under management have decreased, its revenue and margins continue to grow.

If you're considering opening a business on the internet and thinking about a domain, it's important to know the latest data on domain names and extensions. While the .com extension is still the most trusted, there are now 1,602 domain extensions available. The number of domains continues to grow with approximately 33,000 new ones registered daily, bringing the total to around 220 million.

The most popular domain name registrar is GoDaddy, with 76.6 million domains registered- followed by Namecheap with 16.5 million. The average length of the five most popular domains is six characters, and shorter names generally attract more traffic. While some of the newer TDLs can be more expensive, domains with extensions like .club, .online, and .site can be purchased cheaply.

It's worth noting that .com is still the most popular and trusted domain extension, with approximately 160.9 million domains registered. In fact, people are 3.8 times more likely to assume a forgotten domain extension is .com. Despite the variety of extensions available, statistics show that 43% of all domains have initial extensions (.com, .net, .org, .gov, etc.), while 40% have country extensions (.uk, .cn, .de, etc.). Lastly, a study found that the domain extension ".surf" is the most likely to be associated with spam or malicious content.