VeriSign refutes short presentation, says AdSense changes ‘immaterial’

VeriSign (VRSN) said in a statement” A small New York City research firm called ‘DeMatteo Research’ sponsored a short seller’s faulty and incorrect analysis of the impact of recent AdSense changes on Verisign’s domain name business. Based on this incorrect analysis by a presenter who was introduced as being ‘short Verisign’, the presenter made unsubstantiated and unwarranted conclusions that the impact on our business would be ‘severe.’ This is false. We stated on our earnings call yesterday that any possible impact is very likely to be ‘minimal’ and immaterial.” The company added, “The ‘short Verisign’ presenter conflated domain names that are parked with those that are registered to collect advertising revenue from Google AdSense for Domains…Only the third category is likely to be impacted by the changes to the AdSense product, and this category contains less than 2% of our domain name base, by a careful analysis of our own data.”