Verisign has released its Domain Name Industry Brief, which sums up the fourth quarter of 2017 and the entire last year. During the last three months of 2017 the number of registrations in all generic top-level domains (gTLDs) increased by 1.7 million compared to the third quarter (0.5% growth). As of the end of 2017, there were 332.4 million registered domain names in the world. This is 0.9% higher than in 2016.
Such growth is quite modest considering the indicators of 2015-2016 (about 6.8%). The main reason for the decrease of growth rates were the unfortunate indicators for new gTLDs. The number of registered domain names in the new gTLDs fell by about 5 million. Therefore, the market share of the new gTLDs decreased from 7.8% to 6.2%.
Generic top-level domain .NET operated by Verisign demonstrated declined indicators as well. The number of registrations in 2017 decreased by 800,000 and amounted to 14.5 million. The main engines of the insignificant growth, which nonetheless did occur, were domain .COM and country-code domains. Domain .COM grew by another 5 million registrations and finished the year with 131.9 million names. Country-code domains added 3.4 million names and reached an annual growth of 2.4%.
