Global Domain Name Registrations Continue to Grow at a Rapid Clip - Up Over 8% From a Year Ago

Verisign (the operator of the .com and .net registries) has released their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, this one covering the third quarter of 2011. The latest report shows domain registrations worldwide continued to grow at a steady clip in 3Q-2011. The quarter closed with just under 220 million domains registered across all TLDs - a jump of over 8% from the same quarter a year ago. 

Just since the end of the previous quarter (2Q-2011) the number of registered domains went up by 4.9 million names, a healthy 2.3% rise that marked the third consecutive quarter that the number of registered domains rose by at least 2%.

Of the approximately 220 million domains now registered, the majority (112 million domains) are .coms or .nets. Just under 89 million registrations are ccTLDs and the country codes grew even faster than the overall market - rising almost 10% from the same quarter a year ago. 7.8 million more ccTLD domains are registered now than at the same time in 2010. The most popular ccTLD, Germany's .de, is also the second most popular extension in the world, trailing only .com. 

.Net is the third most popular TLD followed by .uk (Great Britain) and .org. Rounding out the top ten, in order, are .info, .tk (Tokelau), .nl (Netherlands), .ru (Russia) and .eu (the European Union). .

Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2011 third quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at: http://www.verisigninc.com/DNIB. 

(Posted Dec. 22, 2011)