Verisign has released its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) for this year’s second quarter. As of June 30, there were 354.7 million registered domain names in the world, which is 2.9 million more than at the end of Q1. Two-thirds of this growth was provided by two ccTLDs – Taiwan’s .TW and Great Britain’s .UK.
The Taiwanese ccTLD added 600,000 registrations over the quarter. Large-scale promotions and discount campaigns held in late spring and early summer attracted great attention from Chinese domain investors. As for the British ccTLD, it grew by 1.3 million names. The increase may be related to the end of a restrictive period during which the owners of matching third-level names had a priority right to register second-level domains in .UK. This period ended in June, and everyone was then able to register the remaining names. The .UK domain zone completed Q2 with 13.3 million registrations.
The .COM position is traditionally strong: it was at 142.5 million at the end of June. But things are not going as well in other “older” gTLDs, including .NET, .ORG, .INFO and .BIZ. The number of registered names in .NET decreased by about 200,000 to 13.6 million names. .ORG lost about 100,000 registrations. Analysts attribute this to competition from the new gTLDs. However, the new domains showed almost no growth in Q2: they added only about 100,000 registrations, and the total number of names in them is approximately 23 million.
