In the Verisign earnings call yesterday the following question was asked by Fred Ziegel, Topeka Capital Markets. Fred Ziegel (Analyst – Topeka Capital Markets):
“In your .brand customer base that you are working with, what’s your sense of how they are thinking about it from the perspective of — are they going to move from .com to .xyz or whatever? Or are they more thinking that this will be an incremental domain? Here is the answer from Pat Kane of Verisign “So not all of our brand customers have determined exactly how they are going to use their top-level domains. But we would imagine that some would complement their current .com with their own offering.”But we don’t see them abandoning their .com.”
Jim Bidzos (Executive Chairman, President and CEO): Added:
“And just to clarify — for example, if we were to employ .verisign, we would never abandon verisign.com.
Like most brands, we’ve invested heavily in promoting it. And everybody is familiar with it, we would probably redirect traffic from one to the other; we would never abandon it.
Of the .brands that have applied, many of them are our back-end registry customers.
So they are not only keeping their .com, but they are also moving their .brand onto our platform to make sure that it runs on the same reliable 18 years of 100% availability infrastructure that we operate.
At this point I think the traffic for anybody in .com is so valuable that I don’t see anybody abandoning their .com for either .brand or for another TLD.”
