ORG are struggling in many country level markets and there has been a long-term decline with. WEB issue is interesting because it is, perhaps, one of the few strings that could be a strong (possibly 10M or more registrations in the first few years) competitor in the existing COM/NET/ORG TLD market. However, without development and usage, a TLD will become a zombie TLD where domain names will be flipped for the price of a hamburger. Speculation does give a land rush boost to a TLD and increases awareness but taking that out of the equation leads to lower registration numbers. The same thing has happened in some of the new gTLDs but with some of these gTLDs, the retention of large numbers of premium domain names by the registries killed off any interest in the gTLDs. ASIA etc) and auctioned off for large sums. Things changed after that with premium domain names being held back by the registries (.MOBI. It never recovered and it is now considered a brand protection registration option rather than a primary brand identity for registrants. Massive speculation from non-EU actors basically killed the TLD in the English language market (Ireland and the UK). EU fiasco where the European Commission, its advisors and the registry hadn't a clue about they were doing. It is possible that they generate some revenue or the registrars would not be doing it. Some registrars will automatically park these undeveloped domain names on their own PPC parking operation. One factor that might be missing from your analysis is the monetisation of undeveloped and unused domain names. Domain names are often treated by registrars and hosters as a means to upsell the customer to more lucrative hosting packages and other services. Discounting, over the last fifteen years or so, has changed the renewal rates and though the blended renewal rates for some of the legacy gTLDs are strong, (>70%) some of the one year renewal rates are around 15% lower. The rate varies and some of the new gTLDs are not doing well on web usage but discounting has lead to very low renewal rates in some of the new gTLDs. With the legacy gTLDs, some of the active web would be be around 25% of the registered domain names. Most domain names are registered but not in use for active websites. It is a small part of the overall market. The speculative angle is sometimes overhyped, John, WEB seemed like a lot of money in the domain world, that would have been 0.15% of the cash Google currently has on hand. This also reminds us that even though $100M to get control of. The total Internet business is on the order of $1 trillion, with the domain business being less than 1% of that. Amazon’s overall revenue is $180G, but most of that is stuff, not bits. Facebook’s revenue is around $40G, Google’s is $100G, jd.com (the Chinese e-commerce company) $55G. Meanwhile, Amazon’s cloud revenue this year is about $20G, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure both about $10G, each of which are likely to double by 2020. So I’m guessing that the total registry and registrar business is in the range of $3 to $5G (billion), growing slowly. The biggest registrar is Godaddy whose revenue is $2.5G/yr which includes a lot of non-registrar revenue. The rest are smaller, mostly much smaller. XYZ with 1.8M, with both bloated by firesale prices. The biggest new TLDs are TOP with 2.9M and. NET top-level domains together have about 150M names. Verisign’s revenues are about $1 billion/year. When you’re standing close to ICANN, the domain business may seem pretty big, but when you stand farther away, not so much.
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