Domain name statistics
Domain Name Registrations Continue to Grow Despite Financial Crisis
There are currently in excess of 174 million domain names registered around the world, with the number growing by around 19 per cent per year, according to VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Report.
Domain names were developed as an easier way of remembering a unique identifier on the internet, for example an internet address, than a series of numbers that form an IP address. And the more easily remembered or more recognisable domain name, generally the more valuable it is.
The first domain name registered was symbolics.com, registered back in March 1985, and it took around two and a half years to register the first 100 domain names.
Growth has been at an exponential rate since then. Over the last two years the total number of registered domain names has increased around 45 per cent according to the VeriSign report, growing by around 54 million. But there are signs this rapid increase could be tempered by the current global financial crisis with registrations growing only five per cent in quarter three (July to September). Total year-on-year registrations grew 26 per cent. This compares to a somewhat slower growth for .com and .net with a two percent quarter on quarter increase and 16 percent year on year growth.
Of the 174 million registered domain names, 69 million are for the approximately 230 country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) such as .de (Germany) and .uk (United Kingdom). The remaining 105 million were for the 21 generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) such as .com and .net.
While figures for gTLDs are not exact, there are around 78 million .com domain names registered, around eleven million .net domains and around 7.25 million .org domains. The largest ccTLD by registrations, .cn (China), has now easily become the second most popular TLD with 13,337,889 registrations as of the end of November. This was a massive increase of 422,152 in just one month, a figure higher than many TLDs have as a total figure, and an increase of 4,878,715 (a 58% increase) over the last 12 months. The next most popular ccTLDs with total registrations (as of 17 December unless otherwise noted) are:
.de - 12,469,349 .uk - 7,277,705 (end November) .nl (The Netherlands) - 3,187,046 .eu (European Union) – 9,984,520.
Statistics for this article came from:
VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief – December 2008 – https://press.verisign.com/easyir/c......
CNNIC – http://www.cnnic.net.cn/en/index/in...
Denic – http://www.denic.de/de/domains/stat...
Nominet – http://www.nominet.org.uk/intellige...
SIDN – http://sidn.nl/.