20 Million Domain Names ... Every Year?

Nearly 5 million domain names were added to the Internet in the third quarter of 2011, bringing the total number of registered domain names to nearly 220 million worldwide across all domains, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief that was published by VeriSign, Inc.

The increase of 4.9 million domain names equates to a growth rate of 2.3 percent over the second quarter of 2011, and marks the third straight quarter with greater than 2-percent growth. The Internet saw the addition of 4.5 million domain names in the first quarter (a 2.2-percent increase) and 5.2 million domain names in the second quarter (a 2.5-percent increase).

The .com and .net Top Level Domains (TLDs) experienced aggregate growth in the third quarter, reaching a combined total of 112 million names. New .com and .net registrations totaled 7.9 million during the quarter. This is a 5.9 percent increase year-over-year in new registrations.

The latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief focuses on some of the new use categories that are likely to emerge out of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) plan to introduce new generic TLDs (gTLDs).

The study examines how the new gTLD process could herald the emergence of a wide range of new uses for gTLDs that could change how Internet users interact with the global addressing system. These new use categories include gTLDs that represent specific brands, hobbies, geographic locations, cultural communities, internationalized domain names, industry sectors and specific Internet-enabled services.