There Are 100 Million .COM Websites In The World

Sites include verisign.com . Published on February 10th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

The last thing I suppose anyone will accuse VeriSign executives for is hubris; at least not where its management of the .Com registry is concerned. The company had earnings call opportunities since October, but only now are we getting a sense of what VeriSign has been able to do with the com registry and the actual domains under management.

VeriSign released its ICANN registry numbers recently, and reported a whopping 100,540,971 domains under management as at October 31, 2011. This number was a 690,243 increase over the course of the month, and marks a milestone in the overall number of .Com domains registered and active on the web.

So why didn’t ICANN report this massive 100 million number back in October? Turns out they couldn’t. According to competitive announcement policies stipulated by ICANN, registry owners cannot disclose competitive numbers until 3 months after the fact. This means that at any given time that we know VeriSign’s numbers; we are at least 3 months behind. The rationale behind this level of reporting I am sure is sound for ICANN, but for the casual domainer who wants to get a quick snapshot of the domain landscape, it is terrible.

Do you think VeriSign should disclose its domain numbers on a monthly basis? Let us know in the comments below.