August 12, 2014
The first quarter of this year finished up with a base of 276 million TLD (Top Level Domain) name registrations according to Verisign Inc.'s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
The company says TLD registrations have increased by 19.3 million, or 7.5 percent, year over year.
In relation to ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain) registrations, the end of Q1 2014 saw a 13.1 percent increase year over year to reach 127.1 million domains.
Australia remains among the top ccTLD's; again ranked no. 10. According to the auDA; the number of .AU registrations was 2,878,797 names at the time of writing.
The .TK (Tokelau), .DE (Germany) and .UK (United Kingdom) extensions continued to lead the ccTLD pack. Versigin notes .TK has experienced four straight quarters where growth has exceeded 4 percent. Much of the .TK extension's popularity is due to the fact it can be registered at no cost - however, the name doesn't have the same level of credibility and trust that .AU domain names experience in Australia.
As of the end of March, there 283 global ccTLD extensions, with the top 10 extensions making up 65.8 percent of all ccTLD registrations.
New gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains) are also featuring in the latest Brief. Verisign states 198 new gTLDs were available for registration by the end of the first quarter and 405,091 have been registered ( 0.27 percent of total gTLD registrations; which includes, .COM, .NET, .ORG, .BIZ and .INFO).
Verisign says its average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 85 billion across all TLDs it operates (.COM, .NET, .EDU, .GOV, .JOBS, .NAME and .CC), with a peak of 120 billion. This represents a year over year increase of 14.8 and 6 percent respectively.
The Domain Name Industry Brief, Volume 11 - Issue 2 - August 2014 can be viewed in full here (PDF).
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