With an increase of 7.5 percent or 19.3 million in worldwide registrations, the base of registered domain names has grown to 276 million worldwide year-over-year, while .com TLD remains to be most popular extension accounting for 113.2 million domain names, claims Verisign.
According to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief report, 5 million domain names have been registered just in the first quarter ending as of March 31, 2014, equating to a growth rate of 1.7 percent over Q4 2013.
Around 198 new gTLDs were available, which accounted to 405,091 registrations or a meager 0.27 percent of the total gTLD registrations. Total ccTLD registrations increased by 2.9 percent or 3.6 million domain names compared to Q4, 2014, to approximately 127.1 million.
The .com and .net TLDs have grown by 4 percent, reaching a total of 128.5 million domain names combined, with .net domain names accounting for 15.2 million. New domain names in the .com and .net TLDs totalled to 8.6 million, down from the 8.8 million registrations last year.
Verisign noted that among the 20 largest ccTLDs, 4 ccTLDs – Tokelau (.tk), Argentina (.ar), India (.in) and Colombia (.co) – have exceed 4 percent overall quarter-over-quarter growth. Tokelau has reported 4 percent growth for 4 straight quarters, however, it is to be noted that the growth is due to the free domain registrations offered.
During the quarter, average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load has increased by 3.4 percent (quarterly) or 14.8 percent (yearly) to 85 billion across all the TLDs, while the peak query load was 120 billion, up by 20.6 percent (quarterly) or 6 percent (yearly).
