Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN), today published its Domain Name Industry Brief for the first quarter of 2014, and five million domain names were added to the Internet in the first quarter of 2014, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 276 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of March 31, 2014.
The increase of five million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.7% over the fourth quarter of 2013.
Worldwide registrations have grew by 19.3 million, or 7.5%, year over year.
The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth, reaching a combined total of approximately 128.5 million domain names in first quarter of 2014, representing a 4% increase year over year.
As of March 31, 2014, the base of registered names in .com equaled 113.2 million names, while .net equaled 15.2 million names.
New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.6 million during the first quarter of 2014 compared to the first quarter of 2013, where new .com and .net registrations totaled 8.8 million.
Total ccTLD registrations were approximately 127.1 million in the first quarter of 2014 with the addition of 3.6 million domain names, or a 2.9% increase compared to the fourth quarter of 2013 an increase of approximately 14.7 million domain names, or 13.1%, from a year ago.
Among the 20 largest ccTLDs, four exceeded 4% overall quarter-over- quarter growth:
Tokelau (8.0%) (.TK) which it should be noted basically offers free domain registrations.
Argentina (7.2 %), (.AR)
India (15.2%) (.In)
Colombia (12.4%) (.Co)
This marks four straight quarters where Tokelau has exceeded 4% growth, however as we said the domain registrations are free.
As of March 31, 2014, there were 283 global ccTLD extensions delegated in the root (including Internationalized Domain Names), with the top 10 ccTLDs comprising 65.8 percent of all ccTLD registrations.
New gTLD domain name registrations totaled 405,091, or 0.27% of total gTLD registrations during Q1
You can see the Verisign infographic by clicking here
