Number of Top Level Domains Reaches 1,000

The number of top level domains has been growing quick in the 15 months or so since new gTLDs started being added to the root for a wide range of cities, regions, brands, generic terms and various others.In July 2013 the first four new gTLD agreements were signed. Prior to this were the original eight generic top level domains including .com and .net, then a further 15 gTLDs including .museum and .name and 286 country code top level domains such as .de and .uk for countries, sovereign states and dependent territories. Including the four gTLDs for which agreements were signed in July 2013, there are now 695 more gTLDs taking the combined total to 1004 top level domains that exist.According to the latest Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, as of 31 March there were 294 million domain names registered across these TLDs (although a few of the new gTLDs have been added in recent months). The largest is .com with 117.8 million .com domains. The largest ccTLD is .tk with over 25 million registrations while .de is approaching 16 million, currently with 15.96 million. The largest of the new gTLDs is .xyz, currently with 1.04 million registered domains.Overall, there were around 152 million registrations across of the “pre-existing” gTLDs, 136.9 million domains registered in all ccTLDs and 4.8 million domains in all of the new gTLDs as of 31 March.