[registrars] Vrsn Wildcard Update

[Donny Simonton]

I doubt if they will voluntarily shut the service down based on one reason,
the amount of money they are making per day.  Let's take a guesstimation on
how much profit they are making a day with this system.

Overture did $265,332,000 in revenue last quarter which breaks down to
$2,948,133.33 per day in revenue.  It was reported that yahoo and MSN
produce 54% of that revenue, I was not able to find the exact numbers, but
MSN does produce more of the revenue per day that Yahoo.

So let's assume Yahoo does 25% and MSN 29%.  For our guesstimation we will
say that SiteFinder is doing 15% of Overtures' daily revenue which would be
$442,220 per day.  In most cases with Overture you will get 40% of the
revenue from Overture, which would be a nice $176,888 per day in profit.
But I'm sure they have a better deal.

I sure know I wouldn't shut down something with the potential of $64,564,120
per year in profit. Would you voluntarily shutdown SiteFinder?  Neither will
Verisign.  ICANN will have to tell them to shut it down or else.

A concerned domain registrar.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-registrars at gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-
> registrars at gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Michael D. Palage
> Sent: Friday, September 19, 2003 9:35 PM
> To: registrars at dnso.org
> Subject: [registrars] Vrsn Wildcard Update
> 
> For those following the SiteFinder discussion, the following may be of
> interest to you.
> 
> http://www.icann.org/announcements/advisory-19sep03.htm
> http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-09-20-dns-wildcards.html
>