Verisign published its quarterly report Domain Name Industry Brief, that describes the state of domain industry in the third quarter of 2014. According to the document, the number of domain names in all gTLDs by the end of September last year reached 284 million, increasing by 1.6% or 4 million. In total the number of registrations in 12 months from September 2013 till September 2014 increased by 18.1 million names or 6.8%. The growth slowed down significantly compared to the previous year - from September 2012 till September 2013 the number of domains increased by 26.4 million with the relative growth rate of 12%.
Domain zones .COM and .NET that are managed by Verisign showed cumulative growth, however it was lower that of the previous year as well: 3,3% against 7,1%. The growth decreased in the ccTLDs: they grew by 12.8 million names or 10.7%. A year ago these indicators were 18 million and 20.7%.
At the same time the number of queries to the global domain name system steadily grows. In the third quarter of 2014 the average daily DNS query load recorded by Verisign was 114 billion, the peak - 318 billion. Both indicators are record high.
