Verisign has recently published its latest report, Domain Name Industry Brief, on the second quarter of 2018. The report stated that the second quarter closed with approximately 339.8 million domain name registrations, an increase of approximately 6 million domain name registrations (or 1.8 percent), compared to the first quarter of 2018. The .COM domain has reached a total of 135.6 million registered names – 1.7 million more than at the end of March 2018. Another domain run by Verisign, the .NET domain, showed zero growth with the number of registrations remaining at approximately 14.1 million.
During the second quarter, total country-code TLD domain name registrations saw an increase of 3.5 million domain names, or 2.4 percent. The Chinese .CN domain is the leading ccTLD with a total of 22.7 million registrations, followed up by Tokelau’s .TK domain, which can be categorized as a ccTLD only conditionally. Russia’s .RU and .РФ domain names, which Verisign traditionally examines together, were ranked fifth, with a total of 5.9 million registrations, surpassed by Germany’s .DE with 16.3 million registrations and the United Kingdom’s .UK with 12 million registrations. Moreover, the report also demonstrates a significant increase in the new gTLD registration volumes, up 7.9 percent to 1.6 million, thus reaching a total of 21.8 million registrations made by the end of June.
