Subscribe to RSSDomain Name Registrations Pass 200 Million Globally
There are now more than 200 million domain names registered around the world, an increase of 3.8 million domain names or two per cent over the previous quarter according to the latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief. Over the past year the increase has been 13.3 million domain names, or seven per cent.
Country code domains increased at less than the overall average to 79.2 million domain names, a 1.4 per cent increase quarter-on-quarter and 2.4 per cent year-on-year.
New .COM and .NET registrations totalled more than 7.5 million during the quarter. This is a six per cent decrease in new registrations from the second quarter. This trend is in line with third quarter seasonality, where new registrations are historically flat to down from second quarter. Year-on-year, new registrations increased seven per cent.
The largest Top Level Domain (TLD) remains .COM with over 90 million registrations followed by .NET with around 12 million. VeriSign refuses to give breakdowns for .COM and .NET registrations.
The second largest TLD after .COM was .DE (Germany) that this week passed the 14 million registration mark. After this comes .NET, .UK (United Kingdom), .ORG, .INFO, .CN (China), .NL (Netherlands), .EU (European Union) and .RU (Russian Federation).
Among the 20 largest ccTLDs, the Russian Federation, Brazil, Argentina and Australia exceeded four per cent quarter-on-quarter growth. Last quarter, seven of the top 20 met the same threshold.
The Russian Federation, Brazil and Australia also joined Poland and France as top 20 ccTLDs exceeding 20 per cent year-on-year growth.
There are more than 240 ccTLD extensions globally, with the top ten ccTLDs comprising 60 percent of all country code registrations.
Apart from the ongoing growth in domain name registrations around the globe, this edition of the Domain Name Industry Brief also looks at how internet use has grown globally.
The report notes that the total number of global internet users has grown by more than 500 per cent in the past decade, but growth has been highest in developing regions. The report notes Africa had less than five million internet users a decade ago but now has more than 100 million. And while in 2000, the number of users in Asia was essentially even with Europe and North America, today it has more than those two continents combined.
These trends indicate that over the last decade the internet has internationalised its audience and provided a platform for services beyond those targeted for speakers of Latin-based languages. Today the English-speaking world makes up less than 40 per cent of internet users.
In the coming decade, the internet will continue to become a ubiquitous, multi-cultural tool, fuelled in part by the adoption of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs). This is demonstrated by the rapid take-up of the Russian Cyrillic IDN, .РФ (.RF), that has passed 600,000 registrations within three weeks of its general availability launch. This compares to the existing ccTLD for Russia, .RU, that recently passed 3.1 million registrations.
The current VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief in English, along with an archive of previous reports in English, Spanish and Portuguese, is available for download from www.verisign.com/domain-name-services/domain-information-center/industry-brief/
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