Who makes money when you buy a domain name?

Who Actually Makes Money When You Buy a Domain Name?

When you purchase a domain name, it might seem like a simple online transaction, but behind the scenes, several players share in the revenue. The first stop is the registrar—companies like GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Google Domains. These are the public-facing businesses that handle your purchase and charge the price you see at checkout.

But registrars don’t keep it all. A portion of that fee goes to the registry, the organization responsible for maintaining the database of all domain names within a specific top-level domain (TLD), like .com or .net. For example, Verisign operates the .com registry and receives a fee from every .com domain sold.

For generic TLDs (gTLDs), the registry also pays a small, predefined fee to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the global coordinator of domain names. However, ICANN doesn’t profit directly from your purchase—its role is oversight and policy-setting, not revenue generation.

It’s a different story with country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) like .uk or .ca. These are managed by national or regional authorities, and since they’re country-specific, the revenue generally stays local. The overseeing body collects fees directly, often without the same intermediary layers seen in gTLDs.

So while you’re only writing one check, your domain purchase supports a chain: from the registrar you interact with, down to the registry and, indirectly, to ICANN for gTLDs. In the case of ccTLDs, the money tends to stay closer to home. It’s a quiet ecosystem, but a vital one for keeping the web’s addressing system running smoothly.