Domain Name Industry Brief – 2012

Here are quick stats from Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The fourth quarter of 2011 closed with a base of 225 million+ domain name registrations across all Top Level Domains (TLDs). This amounts to an increase of 5.9 million domain names, or 2.7 percent over the third quarter.

The base of Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) was 90.6 million domain names. This is a 4.2 percent increase quarter over quarter, and a 13.2 percent increase year over year in the base.

.COM and .NET TLDs experienced aggregate growth, reaching a combined total of 113.8 million domain names in the fourth quarter of 2011. This represents approximately a 2 percent increase in the base over the third quarter of 2011 and an 8 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010.

There is no change in the order of the top 10 TLDs in the fourth quarter of 2011. The order is: .COM, .DE, .NET, .UK, .ORG, .INFO, .TK, .NL, .RU and .EU.

You can view the entire Verisign Report here.

Pic Courtesy: Verisign DNIB Report

VeriSign’s Registry Fee Hike – In Retrospect

The Registry fee for .COM and .NET will increase 2 days from now. The fee for .COM domain names have increased from $7.34 to $7.85 and the fees for .NET domain names have increased from $5.40 to $5.86.

This is the last of the 4 price hikes that Verisign is entitled to, under contract with ICANN.

Here’s a quick summary of the price changes so far:

Why does Verisign keep increasing .COM/.NET fees?

According to them; in the last five years, the volume of DNS queries on Verisign’s global Internet infrastructure has more than doubled, increasing to an average daily query load of 57 billion in the first quarter of 2011. This daily number was ~30 billion queries on average in 2007 and was a miniscule of 1 billion queries per day back in 1999.

The additional fees help the company bolster and scale infrastructure and platforms to ensure smooth functioning of these systems.

* Data sourced from Verisign.com

Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief – Feb ’11

Every quarter, Verisign reviews the state of the domain name industry and highlights important trends, growth opportunities and key performance indicators through in-depth research and analysis. This provides a holistic view of the domain industry and can help businesses make accurate forecasts.

Highlights of the Feb 2011 report include:

• The fourth quarter of 2010 closed with a base of more than 205.3 million domain name registrations across all Top Level Domains (TLDs), an increase of 3.5 million domain names, or 1.7 percent over the third quarter
• Registrations have grown by 12.1 million, or 6.3 percent over the past year
• The .com and .net TLDs reached a combined total of approximately 105.2 million names
• The base of Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) was 80.1 million domain names, a 1.1 percent increase quarter over quarter, and a 0.3 percent increase year over year
• The order of the top TLDs in terms of zone size changed only slightly compared to the third quarter, as .org moved from fifth to fourth largest TLD, dropping .uk (united Kingdom) from fourth to fifth.

You can view the complete Brief here – http://verisigninc.com/assets/domain-name-report-feb-2011.pdf