According to Verisign, (VRSN) which operates the .Com and .Net registry, the number of .Com domain names passed the 114 Million mark for the first time in history today.
The number of .Com domain names according to the Verisign Daily Zone Count is 114,017,341.
Just a few days ago Verisign published the Domain Industry Brief for the 1st Quarter of 2014.
According to the report, as of March 31, Verisign reported there were 113.2 Million registered .Com domain names.
So the number of registered .Com domain names grew by 800,000 from April 1st to lets call it August 15th or 6.5 months.
During the same time the number of new gTLD domains grew from 405,000 registered domain names to around 1.875 Million domain names or a gain of over 1.4 Million domains.
Plenty of records still to come for .COM.
It would have actually passed the 114 million total several days ago. 114,017,341 is the active zone. Adding to it the 153,363 (“not configured”) domains that are registered but have no nameservers yields a total of 114,170,704 dot-com registrations.
You’d think the marketing folks at VeriSign would smarten up, and add those 2 together on their website, to publish the total…..
OK George-
does that mean people are done with the non.com’s or are more folks simply reserving (speculating) on lots more domains in general regardless of right of the dot ?
AND joseph – do you think all these new non.coms are making the .com more desireable.
at this point I am simply some guy that got into this 16 years ago – where I own probably 2-3 .org – the rest being .com’s
@BrianWick,
I don’t know if .COM is MORE desirable. It has always been highly sought after, and numerous people (myself included) expect that to remain true.
Looks like internet usage worldwide is expanding, which means that there’s room for other extensions even as .COM continues to grow. Personally, I like a bunch of different TLDs.
That’s just my opinion, of course. And I’m only a blog troll, living under the bridge of Michael Berkens’s blog. ; ) So ask around to get a representative cross-section of viewpoints.
The commonest domain registration pair is a ccTLD and a .COM. This is what is driving a lot of the growth in .COM TLD. However the growth velocity of .COM has been slowing over the last few years.
The actual number of registrations in .com would be more meaningful than the net change because there is no drops yet for new tlds. So using this method you’ll get a completely different result for growth the day drops start.
The other issue is that 600,000 of those new tld additions are fake (.xyz), free (.berlin) or registry additions (eg north sound).