Latest report from Verisign reveals that around 271 million domain names have been registered on the web as of December last year.
The Domain Name Industry Brief report published quarterly by Verisign indicates that more than five million new domains were added to the company’s database in the last three months of 2013.
In total, 271 million domain names were registered indicating an increase of 18.5 million domain name registrations through 2013. The .com remains the largest domain, with 112 million domain names.
The .tk domain owned by the tiny Pacific island of Tokelau, with approximately 25 million domains, grabbed the second spot on the list. Around 10 percent of Tokelau’s GDP comes from letting web users have access to its domain.
Third in the list was Germany (.de) with around 18 million domains. The .net domain and the UK’s co.uk domain with 15.2 million and 12 million domains hold the fourth and fifth position on the domain list respectively.
All the TLDs in the top 10 in terms of zone size have maintained their rankings and around 73 new gTLDs were delegated into the root.
Verisign also reported that there was an average access of around 82 billion domains per day during the fourth quarter of 2013, reaching to 100 billion on especially busy days. This was a 6.4 percent increase in the daily average compared to the 2012’s last quarter.
However, Verisign expects that the domains figures are likely to change dramatically in the coming future with new generic TLDs to come online soon like the .wiki domain which has already been bought by tech giants Apple, Ericsson, hallmark and Nvidia.