Verisign has published the Domain Name Industry Brief for the first quarter of the year. According to the brief, as of March 31st there were 330.6 million domain names registered on the global network. Growth in the first quarter was 1.3 million names or 0.4% compared to the fourth quarter last year. Annually since March 31st 2016 the number of domains increased by 11.8 million or 3.7%.
The cumulative number of domain names in domain zones .COM and .NET managed by Verisign reached 143.6 million, which shows an increase of 0.8% compared to the first quarter last year. However, the growth rates of registration numbers were lower than a year before. In the first quarter of 2016 10 million new names were registered in .COM and .NET. In the first quarter of this year 9.5 million new names were registered.
