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It looks like the current economic slowdown is having a negative effect on the domain name business – at least insofar as it is reflected in the latest results from VeriSign.
During VeriSign’s 4Q08 earning call Jim Bidzos – Executive Chairman and Interim CEO provided some color commentary on the state of VeriSign’s domain business.
Bidzos reported that VeriSign processed 6.3 million new domain registration in the fourth quarter of 2008 which is a decline of 16 percent from the 7.5 million reported for Q4 2007.
“The decline in new name registrations was expected and reflects the continuation of weakness in names, registered for the purpose of participating in online advertising networks as the Earnings Per Click or EPC or domain name holders continues to weaken,” Bidzos said during the investor conference call.
Bidzos added that Q1 is normally VeriSign’s strongest quarter for new registrations though this year (2009) he’s also expecting that VeriSign will also see a high number of non-renewals on existing domain names.
VeriSign manages the core root DNS servers for the internet which is something that continues to scale. Bidzos reported that VeriSign’s DNS infrastrucutre is now hitting peak loads of nearly 50 billion DNS requests per day,