Verisign has released its Domain Name Industry Brief analyzing the domain market in the fourth quarter of 2019. According to the research, the number of registered domain names reached 362.3 million as of December 31, 2019, which is 13.5 million names (or 3.9 percent) higher year on year. Verisign’s .COM remains the unquestionable leader with 145.4 million names. Another 13.4 million names are registered in .NET, also managed by Verisign. The combined increase in these two gTLDs was 5.9 million registrations compared with last year, or 3.9 percent, like the domain space in general.
New gTLDs also showed relatively good numbers. They closed the year with 29.3 million registrations, which is 5.5 million or 23.2 percent higher than at the end of 2018. It is noteworthy that comparison with the third quarter of 2019 shows approximately the same figures: an increase of 5.3 million registration or 22.2 percent. However, the share of names in the new gTLDs is still less than 10 percent of the total number of domain names registered worldwide: 8.1 percent, with .ICU being the largest gTLD accounting for 16.2 percent of all the registered domain names, followed by .TOP and .XYZ.
The picture regarding ccTLDs is not so optimistic. They closed the year with 157.6 million registrations, which is 4.2 million registrations or 2.6 percent lower than at the end of the third quarter of 2019. Nonetheless, ccTLDs still grew by 3.3 million domain name registrations, or 2.1 percent, year on year.
