By Ron Jackson
& Richard Meyer

Evidence of a domain boom is everywhere. Owners report more offers for their domains and increasingly higher sales prices, venture capital companies have moved into the space and are buying up entire portfolios, pay per click ad rates are strong  and registration levels continue to hit all-time highs. One subset of the registration market just hit a new high water mark on April 22, 2005. The total number of Global TLD  domain registrations (gTLDs) have passed the 50 million mark for the first time, according to statistics compiled by WhoIs.sc. The gTLDs are the five extensions meant for international use; .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz. 

The 50,141,759 gTLD registrations reported April 22 represents a whopping 34% jump from the 37,391,570 reported in mid April of last year by Zooknic.com (another firm that tracks domain trends). Companies and individuals have been pouring online at a phenomenal rate as they realize a web address is just as essential as a business card in today's web-powered world. 

As fast as the gTLDs are growing, individual country code domains (ccTLDs), like .de (Germany), .co.uk (United Kingdom) and .us (United States) are rising even faster. Last fall a ZDNet.com report quoted Verisign statistics that showed ccTLD's now represented 39% of all domain registrations. On April 22 the .de registry, Denic.de reported over 8.6 million .de registrations, the most of any country and second worldwide only to .com. Total registrations including both gTLDs and ccTLD's shot past 65 million by the start of 2005.

.Com remains the runaway registration leader and despite losing a bit of market share to the new gTLDs (.info and .biz), registration numbers for the reigning king still jumped 31% in the past year. As you can see in the table below, all five extensions enjoyed very healthy increases from where they stood in April 2004:

Registrations as of April 22, 2005

5,677,484

3,477,860

.Info�s 203% increase obviously stands out in the statistics above, however that extension's gains were skewed tremendously by the registry giving away over 2 million free registrations in a promotional move to boost .info recognition (some registrars passed the free domains on to their customers while others charged a nominal fee). Even so, if you subtract those two million registrations from the current 50 million total, overall gTLD registrations still would have jumped nearly 30% in the past year. That rate of increase would be 10 points higher than the 20% jump recorded between April 2003 and April 2004. This is solid evidence of an online flood that is growing in strength as new users flock to the web.

In the table below you can see the percentage change in total registrations as well as individual extensions year over year since Jan. 1, 2000.

Percentage Increases in Registrations From Previous Years

The huge percentage increases you see in total registrations in 2000 and 2001 occurred during the first domain registration boom that ended with the bursting of a speculative ecommerce bubble. Only 4 million gTLD domains had been registered in Jan. 1999. One year later the number had soared to more than 10 million and by the spring of 2001 an enormous wave of registrations had pushed the figure to more than 29 million. But then things went south, with the number of active registrations actually falling briefly from 2001 to 2002 before resuming an upward ascent that has continued to gain momentum for the past 3 years. The table below shows the registration numbers for each of the gTLDs since Jan, 1, 1999 (.info and .biz were not introduced until the fall of 2001):

Number of Registrations 

The higher percentage decline for .com is understandable. With 6 times more registrations than .net and over 10 times more than .org, .com has considerably more excess weight to shed. In addition, with almost every good word or term already taken in .com, buyers either have to pony up a higher price or look to the other extensions to get the word/term they want.  Also, .com would have given up less share if .info had not made such a large gain by giving away registrations. The table below shows the year over year market shares for each gTLD.  

Market Share of Global TLD's for Each Extension 

No matter how you slice and dice the data, there is no denying that the domain market is in the midst of a powerful boom. Though no one can tell what the future holds, the chart below shows that if this year's 30% growth rate continues, the number of gTLD registrations would double to 100 million in less than 3 years. Here is a peak at what the future might hold depending on how quickly new users realize a web presence is an indispensable asset in modern society: