VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief shows that 120M domain names are currently registered.
VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN), the registry for .com and .net domain names, released its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief. Among the findings is that there are now 120M domain names registered across all top level domain names. This is up 32% compared to 2005.
Country Code Domains. VeriSign credits country code domain names (ccTLDs) for much of this growth. Overall growth year-over-year was 31%. ccTLD registration spiked in the fourth quarter of 2006 and was 10% greater than Q3 2006. China’s .Cn gets much of the credit as 500,000 .cn domains were registered in the fourth quarter alone. 52 ccTLDs experienced double digit growth including .se (Sweden), .es (Spain), .ru (Russia), and .at (Austria). There are more than 240 ccTLD extensions globally but the top 10 account for 64% of the total. .De (Germany) and .uk (United Kingdom) alone account for 38% of the total.
.Com and .Net. The .com and .net registered domain base increased to about 65M by the end of 2006. Some of the growth in these registrations was driven by bundled packages that include domain names. Examples include hosting, blogging, and photo sharing services.
IDNs. International character domain names had a big leap in 2006, increasing 89% compared to the end of 2005. Growth was 15% in the fourth quarter alone.
Renewal Rates. Renewals for .com and .net domains remain about 77%.
Domain Parking. VeriSign analzyed about 67M .com and .net domains and found that 23% of them are parked. 63% have live web sites and the remaining 14% have no web sites at all. However, VeriSign calls a site “live” if it has multiple pages.
Price Hikes. The report does not mention pending wholesale price hikes for .net and .com domains. VeriSign plans to hike these prices later this year. We’ll see what effect that has on these statistics going forward.
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