Verisign, the company that manages the .com TLD, has finally announced the first of their 7% price increases on .com domain names. On October 15, the price for a .com domain name will increase from $6 to $6.42.
Their contract with ICANN allows Verisign four such price increases over six years. This will be the first. If, or some would say when, all four are in place, the price will be $7.86 (31% higher than today’s price).
The question is if Verisign really needs to raise the price. There are currently around 70 million .com domain names. At $6 each this brings Verisign $420 million per year. Considering domain name registrations are going through the roof, it’s not a stretch to think that there could be 100 million .com domain names within just a few years, which would pull in $600 million per year for Verisign, minus a fee of 25 cents per domain name to ICANN.
With 100 million domain names, if Verisign uses all the four price increases allowed by their contract with ICANN they will pull in an additional $186 million on top of those $600 million. Per year.
Ka-ching?
