Tech Revenue Per Employee: .COM Registry Operator VeriSign $VRSN #4

2017-08-29

Tech Revenue Per Employee: .COM Registry Operator VeriSign $VRSN #4

The Top 20 Tech Companies by Revenue Per Employee (based on S&P 500 companies listed in “Technology” category) courtesy of VisualCapitalist.com:

Rank--Company--Revenue per employee
#1 Apple $1,859,000
#2 Facebook $1,621,000
#3 Alphabet $1,253,000
#4 VeriSign $1,154,000
#5 Visa $1,062,000
#6 Mastercard $906,000
#7 Broadcom $843,000
#8 Lam Research $785,000
#9 Qualcomm $772,000
#10 Microsoft $748,000
#11 Applied Materials $694,000
#12 Activision Blizzard $688,000
#13 Cisco $684,000
#14 Xilinx $640,000
#15 Yahoo! $608,000
#16 PayPal $599,000
#17 Intuit $594,000
#18 Intel $560,000
#19 KLA-Tencor $535,000
#20 AMD $521,000

ICANN has granted VeriSign a perpetual monopoly operating the .COM and .NET generic top-level domains (gTLDs). .COM is the global "gold standard" among all TLDs--as of Q1 2017, the eight largest TLDs (gTLDs & ccTLDs) per the Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief Q1 2017--

Rank--TLD--millions of registered domain names

.COM 128.4
.CN (China) 21.4
.TK (Tokelau) 18.6
.DE (Germany) 16.2
.NET 15.2
.UK (United Kingdom) 10.6
.ORG 10.4
.RU (Russia) 6.4

Beginning in 2014, ICANN grossly over-expanded the number of gTLDs from 22 to more than 1200, a move that is proving to be an ill-conceived, horribly implemented, "disaster" and new gTLDs' domain name registrations are collapsing.

Although .COM domain name registrations continue to grow, .NET registrations have been declining since 2016. As of August 28, 2017, Verisign reports:

DOMAIN NAME BASE
.com 130,079,989 domain name registrations
.net 15,020,269 domain name registrations

"The domain name base is the active zone plus the number of domain names that are registered but not configured for use in the respective Top-Level Domain zone file plus the number of domain names that are in a client or server hold status."--Verisign, Inc.

ACTIVE ZONE
.com 128,542,425
.net 14,777,518

ICANN recently renewed the .NET registry agreement allowing VeriSign to increase fees 10% per annum, whereas .COM prices are restrained by virtue of Amendment 32 (pdf) to NTIA's Cooperative Agreement ($7.85 registration/renewal fee) which will expire, unless extended by NTIA, on November 30, 2018, but also further subject to the terms of an amendment (pdf) to the .COM Registry Agreement between ICANN and VeriSign.

VeriSign also provides registry services for other TLDs, internet security services, and operates 2 (A. and J.) of the internet's 13 authoritative name servers that serve the global DNS root zone.

For more information, see: