Published May 28, 2011
Verisign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief states the first quarter of this year ended with 209.8 million current domain registrations spread over all top level domain name extensions.
This number represented a jump of 4.5 million domain names and 2.2 percent over the final quarter of 2010; and growth of 15.3 million, or 7.9%, over the past 12 months.
Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) fared well also, seeing a 2.1% increase during the quarter compared to the same quarter last year and 5.1% year-over-year growth.
The top ccTLD registries in terms of numbers of registered domain names:
1. .de (Germany)
2. .uk (United Kingdom)
3. .nl (Netherlands)
4. .eu (European Union)
5. .cn (China)
6. .ru (Russian Federation)
7. .br (Brazil)
8. .ar (Argentina)
9. .it (Italy)
10. .pl (Poland)
Australian domain names were also among the top 20 ccTLDs and exceeded 4 percent quarter over quarter growth. Australia and Canada were the only two countries among the top 20 ccTLDs to exceed year over year growth of 20 percent.
New .net and .com domain names came to a total of 8.3 million during the quarter, a 9.2 percent increase year over year.
Verisign says an estimated 88 percent of registered .com and .net domain names point to a website - but "website" is a rather broad label according to their definition. These sites may consist of multiple pages, a single page, under construction, parked pages and pages belong to domainers, (those who trade in domain names) running ads for revenue generation purposes.
The report states Verisign's average daily Domain Name System (DNS ) query count amounted to 57 billion, peaking at 67 billion - each being 6% higher than the same time period in 2010.
Verisign manages two of the world's 13 Internet root name servers. Root name servers are a crucial aspect of the Internet; acting as the first step in translating human readable domain names into IP addresses.
The full Verisign Q1 2011 Domain Name Industry Brief can be viewed here (PDF)
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