Domains registered for vibe coded sites show high renewal rates.

Nordic Domain Days kicked off in Stockholm on Sunday. I’ll have a full wrap-up later this week.

On Monday, Stuart Dinnes, who leads account management for European domain registrars at Verisign, provided interesting statistics that I haven’t seen before.

During the Q1 investor conference call, Verisign said the first-year renewal rate for .com domains is in the mid-40% range. For second-year and later renewals, it’s in the mid-80s.

Here’s where things get interesting: if the domain has certain characteristics or is used in a certain way, the first-year renewal rate increases significantly.

For example, if it’s built into a web presence or set up to handle email, the renewal rate is 9% higher.

Even a simple domain forward can increase the odds that a domain is renewed, tacking on 13%.

But here’s the most interesting one as it relates to the future: domains registered for websites built with AI tools renew at a 20% higher rate.

A big caveat: this is based on a very, very small subset of domains. Domains need to have been registered for a year before it’s time to renew, and much of the growth in vibe coding tools has happened in the past 6-12 months.

Verisign provided a slide showing the relative numbers of new registrations by usage. It didn’t have a labeled y-axis, but visually, it shows how minuscule this segment was last year:

With general content sites losing importance as people get their answers from AI, this will be a necessary area for growth in the domain business.

Verisign has started rewarding domain registrars for new .com and .net registrations that are more likely to renew, i.e., those that include a product or service, such as email.

Overall, the percentage of first-year .com and .net domains that Verisign categorizes as attached to an online presence has been increasing substantially in recent years, reaching 18% last year.

The company analyzed other registries’ namespaces and their zone files to estimate their first-year renewal rates:

.Org had the best rate at 51%. It’s worth noting that Public Interest Registry, the organization that manages .org, created registrar incentives for registration quality many years ago.

All of the new TLDs on the slide offer cheap first-year registrations, and I’m actually a bit surprised their renewal rates are as high as they are. It shows the power of cheap first-year registrations for building a subscription base.