Verisign released their Q1 2014 Domain Name Industry Brief today, a report that said 5 million domain names were added to the Internet in the opening quarter of this year. That brings the total number of registered domain names (across all extensions) to a total of 276 million worldwide. 

Compared to where things stood at the end of the same quarter a year ago (Q1-2013),   registrations have grown by 19.3 million (7.5%). Verisign said the largest top-level domains in order by zone size were:

Verisign said .com, by far the world's most popular extension, accounted for 113.2 million of the registered names. Verisign administers the .com TLD as well as 4th-ranked .net that had 15.2 million names registered at the end of Q1. 

Verisign also noted that 198 new gTLDs were available for registration during 1Q-2014 but they totaled just 405,091 registrations, barely one fourth of 1% (.027) of total gTLD registrations. Of course, 1Q-2014 was also the first quarter that any new gTLDs were available, so we will learn a lot more about how they are being adopted in the quarters to come.

With many of these domain name registrations representing more businesses coming online, Verisign said there is an increased concern over domain name security. The brief’s featured article, The Domain Threat Landscape: Protecting Critical Infrastructure Requires a Layered Security Approach, provides a brief summary of domain name hijacking and some preventative measures and tools to help ensure the security of a domain name. You can download the full brief from this page: www.VerisignInc.com/DNIB.