July 2, 2015
Verisign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief states the first quarter of this year finished up with a base of 294 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs).
This represented an increase of six million domain names, or 1.9 percent over the final quarter of last year. TLD registrations have grown by 17.8 million, or 6.5 percent, year over year.
The largest TLDs in order by zone size did not change from Q4 2014, being:
Verisign points out the .tk name space is an interesting case. It is a country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) providing free registration. The names never truly expire; i.e. are deleted - once no longer in use by the registrant, the name is taken back by the registry and traffic is sold to advertising networks.
With regard to ccTLDs specifically, Australia's .AU registry maintains a top 10 position; ranked 9th. At the time of writing, there were 2,992,692 Australian domain names registered according to information from the auDA.
Total ccTLD registrations at the end of Q1 2015 came to 136.9 million domain names, a 2.2 percent increase compared to the previous quarter, and an 8.2 percent rise year over year.
At the end of Q1, there were 286 global ccTLD extensions delegated in the root with the top 10 representing 66.9 percent of all ccTLD registrations.
New gTLD (generic Top Level Domains) registrations totaled 4.8 million at the end of the quarter, representing 1.6 percent of total domain name registrations.
Verisign says its average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 119 billion across all the TLDs it operates - an 8.6 percent increase over the previous quarter and 40.2 percent higher year over year.
The Domain Name Industry Brief / June 2015 can be viewed in full here (PDF).
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