Verisign publishes a quarterly report about the domain name industry called The Domain Name Industry Brief. The latest report, summing up Q1 2009, was just released.
Since there is always a lot of data in these reports to mull through, we decided to pick out what we think are some of the more interesting facts and figures and sum them up in this article.
Highlights in numbers
These are a few highlights from the Verisign report that we thought were worth highlighting.
- At the end of Q1 2009 there were nearly 183 million registered domain names across all TLDs.
- The total number of domain names across all TLDs grew by 12% compared to the same time last year.
- ccTLDs (country-code TLDs) account for 74.1 million of those domain names.
- The number of ccTLD domain names grew by 18% compared to the same time last year.
Included in the report is also this chart that shows the number of domain names across all TLDs, quarter by quarter. Note the dominance of .com. It’s still by far the most popular TLD.
An interesting side note worth mentioning is that Verisign also includes information about the load on its DNS infrastructure in these reports. Since Verisign is the domain registry that manages the .com and .net TLDs it has its work cut out for it. Verisign’s DNS servers handled an average of 38 billion queries per day in Q1 2009, up from 35 billion for the same period last year.
Top domain name extensions
Which are the most popular TLDs? Look no further. That was also included in the report.
Top 10 TLDS in terms of size:
- .com
- .cn
- .de
- .net
- .org
- .uk
- .info
- .nl
- .eu
- .biz
Top 10 ccTLDs in terms of size:
- .cn (China)
- .de (Germany)
- .uk (United Kingdom)
- .nl (Netherlands)
- .eu (European Union)
- .ru (Russian Federation)
- .ar (Argentina)
- .it (Italy)
- .br (Brazil)
- .us (United States)
And here’s another interesting factoid from the report: There are 240+ ccTLD extensions, but the top 10 account for 64% of the registrations.
Further reading
There is plenty of more information (and charts) to be found in the full report from Verisign (PDF) if you like this kind of stuff.
Looks like domain name registrations won’t be slowing down anytime soon, just like the overall growth of the Web keeps charging ahead.
