Verisign: 2012 Ends With 252 Million Domain Names: 121 Million .com/.net

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VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN) just published it quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief. announcing that more than 6 million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2012, bringing the total number of registered domain names to more than 252 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Dec. 31, 2012

The increase of 6.1 million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 2.5% over the third quarter of 2012, and marks the eighth straight quarter with greater than 2%.

Worldwide registrations grew by 26.6 million, or 11.8%, year over year in 2012.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter of 2012, reaching a combined total of approximately 121.1 million domain names a 6.4% increase year over year

As of Dec. 31, 2012, the base of registered names in .com equaled 106.2 million names, while .net equaled 14.9 million names.

New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.0 million during the fourth quarter of 2012.In the fourth quarter of 2011, new .com and .net registrations totaled 7.9 million.

The .com and .net renewal rate for the fourth quarter of 2012 was 72.9 percent, up slightly from 72.5 percent for the third quarter of 2012.

The base of Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) was 110.2 million domain names, a 5 percent increase quarter over quarter, and a 21.6 percent increase year over year.

Top ccTLD Registries by Domain Name Base, Fourth Quarter 2012:

  1. .de
  2. .tk
  3. .uk
  4. .cn
  5. .nl
  6. .ru
  7. .eu
  8. .br
  9. .au
  10. .fr

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  3. John McCormac says

    Generating accurate stats on ccTLDs is a tricky thing, Michael,
    And these repurposed ccTLDs make it harder. Some of them, like .co ccTLD might have a core of about 20% local registrations but the ones like .tk aren’t really ccTLDs in the traditional sense of serving a local market. The repurposed .co ccTLD main market is the US market and it has little traction in markets outside of the US (in country level market share terms).

    Even Verisign notes that 97% of the .tk domains are free registrations. The inclusion of free TLDs like .tk can obscure some subtle trends such as ccTLD/com pairing (where the same name is registered by the in the local .ccTLD and .com by the same registrant (partially due to brand protection and partially due to the “must-register” upsell by registrars). It would be interesting to see a registrant breakdown for .tk.

  4. windy_city says

    …why are they trying to make a perfecta outta .com/.net regs?

    With 106+ million .com regs and .net’s 15 million, it sounds ludicrous to bundle them up like they did in the article. Dot net doesn’t even belong with .com, but I guess there is a reason why they are doing that, I just don’t see any justification for it…