VeriSign has just put out its quarterly report on the web domain industry stating that there are now just about 183 million domain names in existence. This represents a 3% increase from last quarter and a 12% increase from last year. But perhaps most interesting is the slight turnaround that has taken place in the all-important .com/.net section of the industry.
The fourth quarter of the year is traditionally a slow one for .com and .net registrations, but the whole of 2008 was particularly slow, at least partially due to the “current macro-economic environment,” according to the report. But Q1 2009 saw those numbers turn around:
New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of approximately 2.4 million per month in the first quarter of 2009 for a total of 7.3 million new registrations in the quarter. This 17 percent increase from the previous quarter also marked the first positive growth rate in new registrations since the first quarter of 2008.
So VeriSign released its Q4 2008 Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF) yesterday, a document that zooms in on “the state of the domain name industry through a variety of statistical and analytical research”. Let’s take a look at their findings and stats.
As you could have deducted from the headline, last year ended with a total base of 177 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domains (TLDs), up from 153 million at the end of 2007 representing a 16% growth rate. Over the entire year, there was an average of 11.9 million new domain names registered per quarter compared to an average of 12.2 million new domain names registered each quarter in 2007.
Last quarter, like Q3 2008, the five largest TLDs in terms of overall size were .com, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net, and .org. The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 90.4 million domain names at the end of 2008.
Even as the number and type of domain names continues to expand, the number of companies that control all these assets dwindles. The most recent news: Verisign has acquired the London-based, Carlyle-backed company that runs the .name top level domain. The news has not been formally announced, but Verisign, which also runs the .com, .net and .org domains, among others, sent out an email to all registrars with the news:
Verisign is exploring the sale of its Moreover and Weblogs assets, we’ve confirmed from a source with knowledge of the sale process. Both businesses were acquired in October 2005 - Moreover for an estimated $25 million and Weblogs for an undisclosed but significantly smaller amount.
We had previously heard rumors that Verisign was in negotiations to sell the assets, which have been combined into the Real-Time Publisher Services business unit, to the Associated Press in connection with a settle agreement over the AP’s 2007 copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit against Verisign. However, that litigation was settled last month without any agreement over the RTP assets.
Verisign’s new Personal Identity Portal (PIP from now on) isn’t the sexiest application out there to help you manage passwords. But it has Verisign’s strong reputation for security behind it, and it is a surprisingly easy way to manage website credentials.
PIP is a a single sign in solution that supports both OpenID (you are issued a Verisign OpenID) and direct sign in to a number of supported websites. If a site doesn’t support OpenID, login is handled by populating the username and password fields directly.
So far, PIP isn’t much different than the previously covered Clickpass and other solutions. It supports a lot more sites, however. And it also handles signin directly from a bookmarklet that resides directly in the browser chrome.
Being Verisign, they’ve also added optional support for two factor authentication. Users can choose to receive a unique one time security token for each login, and/or get a browser-side certificate. Most users will find this overkill.
From a usability standpoint, the biggest drawback is the need to stay logged in to an active PIP browser session. Users could set it to their home page, I guess, and make it the first sign each time they use their browser. One use case that is particularly compelling - mobile devices. Verisign says iPhone support is coming very soon - Verisign says they are experiencing “a few challenges with certificates on the iPhone Safari.”
A last, possibly unintended feature: the pop up box is a great easy navigation tool for much-visited sites.
Melbourne IT has acquired Versign’s Digital Brand Management Services (DBMS) division for $50 million.
DBMS offers a portfolio of digital brand security services, including domain name management, global brand expansion services and digital brand monitoring solutions. Services include brand and fraud protection and “global digital brand expansion.” According to a release Verisign put out when the service launched in 2006, the service “benefits marketing executives by allowing the marketing team to holistically and globally manage the customers’ online experience with the firm’s brands.”
Melbourne IT was originally part of Melbourne University and was Australia’s equivalent to Network Solutions, maintaining a monopoly on .com.au registrations until 2002. The company is best remembered locally as one of the boom/ bust stocks of the first dot-com bubble, reaching lofty heights after listing in 1999. Melbourne IT was one of the first companies globally to be granted access to .com sales, being one of five granted the rights to .com sales by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers as Network Solutions monopoly was slowly unwound in 1999. MelbourneIT built a global client base based on undercutting Network Solutions rates at the time by 10%.
(via DomainTools)
As anticipated by TechCrunch UK in early January, OpenID is welcoming some big new partners to the club - Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM (TechCrunch UK anticipated all but Microsoft).
Google has been dabbling with OpenID for some time with its Blogger platform (and Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of OpenID, is now a Google employee).
Yahoo also announced support for OpenID earlier this month, which more than tripled the number of OpenID accounts to 350 million. 10,000 websites now accept OpenID accounts for login.
All of the newcomers, along with Yahoo, have joined OpenID’s corporate board and, we assume, will be making their user accounts OpenID-compatible. But it’s not clear that any of them are in a hurry to become a “relying party” (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to their sites). OpenID looks like it’s going to be a winner, so big companies making their user accounts OpenID compatible is a good hedge. Everyone, of course, wants to be an ID issuer, since they get to “own” the user. Less attractive is allowing users from other sites to log into your services, so don’t expect that functionality to come for some time.
Electronic agreements have greased the wheels of commerce, causing businesses to push a lot of digital paper these days. Several startups have popped up to help manage these contracts (mostly through eSignatures): EchoSign, DocuSign, VeriSign, Entrust, amongst others. And people are using them. DocuSign claims to have completed over 5 million eSignatures alone.
Austin-based Mumboe, originally founded in 2005 as FineTooth, has recently relaunched as another SAS contract management tool. It is similar to Negonation, in that it doesn’t handle eSignatures, but the contracts themselves. FineTooth’s original software solution used natural language analysis to help manage contracts by extracting the important details from contracts. Mumboe, short for the mumbo jumbo found in most contracts, lets companies create contracts from templates, share, search, and track important milestones. The company currently has a three month free trial.
Verisign has confirmed their acquisition of the Weblogs.com ping server network and related assets. See the Verisign blog post here as well.
We aren’t going to write a lot about it here on TechCrunch because Keith Teare and I were advisors to Weblogs.com on the deal. I will say that I believe this is a game-changing event for the blogosphere.
Dave Winer, the founder of Weblogs.com and the inventor of blog ping servers tells the story here (and kindly mentions our involvement).
If you’d like to understand more about ping servers, I wrote a profile of Weblogs.com in July of this year.
For more coverage, you should also read Jason Kottke, Staci Kramer, Robert Scoble and Michael Bazeley.
Congratulations, Dave. You deserve this, my friend.
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