Ten Dollars Against Everything Built On ItWide moat
VeriSign (VRSN) — moat facet
Nobody abandons a .com to save ten dollars, because the cost of abandoning it is a rebrand.
Ten dollars and twenty-six cents is what VeriSign charges a registrar for a year of a .com name.1 It is worth thinking about what sits on the other side of that transaction.
For a business of any size, the .com is the cheapest line item in the marketing budget and the load-bearing one. Every email address contains it. Every business card, invoice, vehicle livery and piece of packaging repeats it. Every inbound link a decade of work has accumulated points at it, and so does whatever search ranking those links earned. The app store listing references it. Customers type it from memory. The cost of abandoning it is not the ten dollars; it is a rebrand.
That asymmetry is why the renewal decision is not really a decision. A company weighing a 7% increase — seventy-one cents at wholesale, perhaps a dollar or two at retail — against the cost of changing its address is not weighing anything. This is what economists mean by an inelastic good, and VeriSign has one of the cleanest examples in the listed markets.
The asymmetry inverts for the other half of the base. A portfolio holder with ten thousand speculative names faces a five-figure annual bill and no revenue attached to any of them, so every increase prices some inventory out. That is where the non-renewals come from, and it is a real limit: the price rises produce almost no resistance from the customers who matter and steady attrition among the ones who do not.
Ten dollars against a rebrand has been the asymmetry for thirty years and will be the asymmetry at $13.42. Nothing about the value of being findable has fallen, and nothing about the cost of changing an address has.
Seventy-one cents a year is what the 7% step costs a registrar per .com name, and perhaps a dollar or two at retail. Set against the cost of changing a company address — every email, every link, every printed material, every search ranking — it is not a decision anyone makes. The exception is the portfolio holder with thousands of names, for whom the same seventy-one cents multiplies into a real bill.
- ReportedThe registry-level wholesale fee for each new and renewal .com registration is $10.26.VeriSign, Inc., Form 10-K FY2025 — Item 7, Management's Discussion and Analysis. Revenues $1,656.6M (+6%) against $1,557.4M in 2024 (+4%) and $1,493.1M in 2023; operating income $1,121.0M (+6%). Costs as a percentage of revenues: cost of revenues 11.8% (12.3%, 13.2%), research and development 6.3% (6.2%, 6.1%), selling, general and administrative 14.2% (13.6%, 13.7%), total costs and expenses 32.3% (32.1%, 33.0%), operating income 67.7% (67.9%, 67.0%), interest expense (4.6)%, net income 49.8% (50.4%, 54.8%). The .com and .net domain name base was 173.5 million at 31 December 2025 (+3%) against 169.0 million in 2024 (−2%) and 172.7 million in 2023. VeriSign processed 41.7 million new .com and .net registrations in 2025 against 37.4 million in 2024; the final third-quarter 2025 renewal rate was 75.4% against 72.2%. The registry-level wholesale fee rose from $9.59 to $10.26 for .com effective 1 September 2024 and from $9.92 to $10.91 for .net effective 1 February 2024. Geographic revenues: U.S. $1,093.1M (+6%), EMEA $279.4M (+12%), APAC $184.6M (+5%), other $99.5M (+3%). VeriSign repurchased 3.4 million shares for $858.6M in 2025, with $1.08 billion remaining under a programme authorised to $1.50 billion effective 24 July 2025. — FY2025 · publ. 2026-02-05 · source ↗