Global Domain Registrations Closing in on 350 Million: Verisign

There were approximately 348.7 million domain names registered across all TLDs at the end of 2018, an increase of approximately 6.3 million, or 1.8%, compared to the third quarter of 2018 according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign. For the year registrations grew by approximately 16.3 million, or 4.9%.

For country-code top level domain (ccTLD) registrations, they totalled approximately 154.3 million at the end of 2018, an increase of approximately 5.0 million or 3.4%, compared to the third quarter of 2018. For the year ccTLDs increased by approximately 8.2 million, or 5.6%.

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of approximately 153.0 million domain name registrations in the domain name base at the end of the fourth quarter of 2018, an increase of approximately 1.3 million domain name registrations, or 0.8%, compared to the third quarter of 2018. The .com and .net TLDs had a combined increase of approximately 6.6 million domain name registrations, or 4.5%, year over year. The vast majority of these were accounted for by .com with approximately 139.0 million, while the .net domain name base totalled approximately 14.0 million domain name registrations. In 2 years .net registrations have declined by around 1.3 million.

New .com and .net domain name registrations totalled
approximately 9.5 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2018, compared to
9.0 million domain name registrations at the end of the fourth quarter of 2017.

For new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), there were
approximately 23.8 million registrations at the end of the fourth quarter of
2018, an increase of approximately 0.4 million domain name registrations, or
1.6%, compared to the third quarter of 2018. For the year, new gTLDs increased
by approximately 3.2 million, or 15.5%, year over year.

For geographic new gTLDs there were 46 delegated at the end of 2018 that met the following criteria: 1) has a geographical focus and 2) has more than 1,000 domain name registrations since entering general availability (GA). The chart below on the left summarises their registrations, for all ccTLDs with the corresponding geographical new gTLDs within the same geographic region. In addition, the chart below right highlights the top 10 geographical new gTLDs as a percentage of the total geographical TLDs.