There Are 233 Million Domains Registered

Sites include verisign.com . Published on July 30th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Registered a domain in the last year and a half? If so you might have helped to swell the total number of Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to a staggering 233 million. This is the figure released by VeriSign in its State of the Domain quarterly report for the period ending March 31, 2012.

In all 7.5 million more domains; this represented a 3.3% growth over Q4 figures for 2011. Standing tall among all domains of course, is the mighty .COM and .NET extensions; combined they have a total number of 116.7 million registrations. Country level TLDs are also gaining strong support among new registrants and there was a 4.8% increase in ccTLDs over the first quarter of 2012. This brought the total estimated number of registered ccTLDs to a staggering 94.9 million domains.

The domain aftermarket is heavily tied to registrations and the really high end sales are almost always tied to very longstanding registrations. There are those who say that the best names are all gone but savvy domainers are still registering fresh domains on new TLDs which come out. The .CO extension made many domainers millions the other day and more TLDs will come in the future.

VeriSign itself is a key influencer in the domaining industry as it owns and operates the .COM registry. The report is therefore a key insight for those players who need to see the overall picture and trends of where the aftermarket is going.