There are now almost 183 million domain names registered around the world across all Top Level Domains according to the latest 2009 Domain Name Industry Brief from VeriSign. This represents a 17 per cent increase year-on-year and a four per cent increase over the fourth quarter of 2008. Registrations increased twelve per cent over the same quarter from last year while ccTLD registrations continued to increase at a faster rate than gTLDs.The June 2009 edition of the report, covering the first quarter of 2009 till the end of March, shows that although registrations are still growing at a rate that almost any other industry or economy around the world would find brilliant, growth has slowed markedly. Twelve months ago, the same report for 2008 had shown total domain names registered had grown by 26 per cent year-on-year and a six per cent increase on the previous quarter.
ccTLD Registrations
Registrations of country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) continued to outstrip those of generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) with registrations increasing 18 per cent on the same quarter in 2008 and a four per cent increase on the fourth quarter 2008, reaching a total of 74.1 million registrations.The largest TLDs in terms of base size were .com, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net, .org, .uk (United Kingdom), .info, .nl (Netherlands), .eu (European Union), and .biz.When it comes to looking at new registrations, there were nearly three million ccTLDs added in the first quarter of 2009, representing a 38 per cent growth over the previous quarter, but a 39 per cent decline from the same quarter of 2008. There are more than 240 ccTLD extensions globally, but the top 10 ccTLDs contribute to 64 percent of the total number of registrations.For total new domain name registrations, there were nearly 11.8 million registered in the quarter, a 17 per cent growth in new registrations over quarter 2008, but also a 17 per cent decline from the same period in 2008.Of the 25 largest ccTLDs, growth as a percentage was highest in .us (United States) and .ru (Russia). Registrations of .us domain names grew by twelve per cent quarter on quarter in part due to a special price promotion, while .ru registrations increase by eight per cent, a slower growth than in previous quarters.The Chinese ccTLD, .cn, which has been experiencing notable growth, slowed its growth to four percent quarter over quarter, the VeriSign report noted. This is the slowest growth for .cn over the past 12 quarters. The .cn registry announced a fee increase from their promotional fees 1 RMB Yuan (US$0.14) per year to 18 RMB Yuan (US$2.64) per year starting in March 2009.2 Overall, 40 percent of the top 25 largest ccTLDs experienced growth rates in the fi rst quarter of 2009 that were higher than the growth rates in the fourth quarter of 2008.In terms of the total base of domain name registrations, .cn, .de and .uk were the largest ccTLDs. Year over year, .cn’s growth rate topped the list at 27 percent, likely driven by aggressive pricing and registrar promotions. Rounding out the top three ccTLDs were .de and .uk, at six percent and 12 percent growth year over year, respectively. Together, the bases of domain name registrations for these three ccTLDs represented 46 percent of all ccTLD domain name registrations.
.com/.net Registrations
For .com and .net registrations, VeriSign’s report noted there were 92.4 million domain names registered at the end of the quarter, a two per cent increase on the fourth quarter of 2008 and a nine per cent increase on the same quarter in 2008. This is a somewhat slower increase than in previous quarters. For the corresponding report in 2008, growth was five per cent quarter-on-quarter and 22 per cent year-on-year.
DNS Queries
VeriSign’s DNS infrastructure has continued to see growth in average daily queries with 29 per cent compound annual growth since 2006. VeriSign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 38 billion during the first quarter of 2009, resulting in hundreds of millions of Internet users accessing Web sites or sending email. This is an increase from the 35 billion queries in fourth quarter 2008. Query rates can reach over 750,000 queries per second.VeriSign’s Domain Name Industry Brief is available from:
www.verisign.com/Resources/Naming_Services_Resources/Domain_Name_Industry_Brief/