October 3, 2012
The end of June saw a base of more than 240 million domain name registered across all Top-Level Domains (TLDs).
According to Verisign's October 2012 Domain Name Industry Brief, registrations have increased by 25.5 million, or 11.9 percent, year over year.
The COM and NET extensions combined retain much of the power-base, representing nearly half of TLD's registered as of the end of Q2 2012, numbering 118.5 million names.
The largest TLDs in terms of base size were .com, .de (Germany), .net (generic), .tk (Tokelau), .uk (United Kingdom), .org (generic), .info (generic), .nl (Netherlands), .ru (Russian Federation) and .cn (China) respectively.
While the presence of Tokelau's extension puzzles many given it is a tiny nation of just over 1,400 people; the reason for the extension's popularity (although it does appear to suffer some reputation problems) is simple - .TK domain registrations are free for the most part.
Australia's .au space again made the top country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) list - at number 9.
It appears ccTLD's are becoming increasingly popular, with total ccTLD registrations up 5.7 percent compared to the first quarter and up 18.5 percent from a year ago. The use of a ccTLD with a trusted extension such as a .com.au domain name is often viewed favourably by online shoppers wary of opening their purse strings due to security concerns.
Verisign states its average daily Domain Name System (DNS ) query load during the second quarter of this year was 68 billion, with a peak of a massive 90 billion queries. The daily average increased 1.9 percent and the peak jumped 21 percent compared to the first quarter. Year over year, the daily query average increased 19.8 percent and the peak jumped by a whopping 32 percent.
Verisign's October 2012 Domain Name Industry Brief can be viewed in full here (PDF).
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