PWV Portfolio Feed

the vowel-to-consonant ratio in gouache is out of hand

$1,656,600,000
Verisign’s annual revenue in 2025.

Verisign owns .com and .net. They make over a billion and a half dollars every year from .com registrations alone. They’re a public company—Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway) bought shares starting in 2012

401,600,000
Domain name registrations on the internet at the end of Q2 2026.

I wonder how long it’ll take to reach a billion—and I think we will, eventually—considering this number is only ~30 million more than last year’s. About 167 million of these are .com (still over 40% of all domains!)

$135,000,000
The winning bid for .web on July 27, 2016 by Verisign.

NU DOT CO LLC, secretly bidding on behalf of Verisign, won .web in an ICANN auction for $135 million in 2016 (part of the 2012 gTLD round). It’s the most any registry has paid for a gTLD in auction (that we know of)

$227,000
ICANN’s base application fee for the 2026 gTLD round.

Right now, until August 12, anyone can apply to create a new top-level domain. Corporates can apply to own their .brand, cities can apply to run their .geo, and registries can apply to sell .whatever to the general public

8.8.8.8
The IP address of Google’s public DNS resolver.

As review: when you plunk a domain name into your browser’s address bar, it goes to find the IP address behind the domain. A DNS resolver is the program that does this, like an internet phone book

$4,000
ICANN’s annual accreditation fee for registrars.

GoDaddy, Porkbun, Squarespace, Cloudflare, et al. pay $4,000 per year to ICANN. That doesn’t seem like much, and how many registrars could there even be, right? 3,023. There are 3,023 accredited registrars

1,595
Top-level domains delegated to the root zone.

As of today, there are 1,595 top-level domains in the DNS root. Of those, 316 are ccTLDs and 1,250 are gTLDs (g for generic). The generics break down into brand TLDs, like .google; geoTLDs, like .nyc; and general ones, like .press (oh, hey)

920
The RFC that established the initial set of top-level domains.

In 1984 Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds wrote RFC 920, “Domain Requirements,” defining the first TLDs: .com , .org, .gov, .edu, and .mil

277
The number of top-level domains owned by Identity Digital.

Identity Digital, formerly Donuts, raised $100 million to apply for hundreds of top-level domains in 2012. In the years since, they’ve bought up other registries to grow their portfolio, which includes the TLDs .email, .lgbt, and .wtf

63
The maximum length of a domain label.

To illustrate that 63 characters is Quite Long Enough, consider for example the 60-character title of one of my favorite essays, recast as a domain name: getting-away-from-pretty-much-already-being-away-from-it-all.com

47%
The percentage of Anguilla’s revenue from .ai domain sales in 2025.

Anguilla is using .ai proceeds to fund infrastructure, like schools, roads, and airports. Hypothetically, Anguilla could even fund a Universal Basic Income of ~$2-5k per citizen (kind of like Alaska’s oil-funded dividend)

13
The number of DNS root servers.

There’s a set of root servers around the world whose primary job is to store domain-IP pairs. There are only 13 such servers. Technically, it’s 13 IP addresses shared by about two thousand actual servers around the world. 12 organizations run those 13 root servers

$10.26
The wholesale price Verisign charges for .com domains.

On November 1, this will go up to $10.97. Verisign has a contract with ICANN and the US Department of Commerce (the NTIA, technically) that allows them to raise .com prices by up to 7% for the last four years of the six-year contract

10
The maximum number of years for which you can register a domain.

Owning your own domain is about the closest you can get to ownership on the internet (much more control than a social media account, say)

2
The number of characters in a ccTLD.

Any top-level domain you come across with two letters belongs to a country. So for example .ai, .io, and .co belong to Anguilla, the British Indian Ocean Territory, and Colombia, respectively. Those are called country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs