Verisign has presented its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) for the third quarter. It shows a drop in the total number of domain names registered worldwide. As of September 30, there were a total of 364.6 million domains, which was 2.7 million or 0.7 percent lower than three months earlier. The decrease is even more significant compared with the same period last year: 6.1 million or 1.6 percent, according to Online Domain.
At the same time, the gTLDs .COM and .NET managed by Verisign have grown. The combined growth in the number of names registered in these two domain zones amounted to 0.9 percent QoQ and 5.1% YoY. In absolute terms, this amounts to 1.5 and 8.3 million domains, respectively. The total number of domains registered in .COM and .NET reached 172.1 million by the end of the third quarter.
New gTLDs have also grown, by 0.6 million registrations or 2.7 percent compared with last year, amounting to 23.5 million registrations in total. This means country-code domains were “responsible” for the decline. The number of domains registered there dropped 4.8 million or 3 percent compared with the second quarter. YoY, the decline was 7.7 million registrations or 4.8 percent. As of September 30, 2021, DNIB estimates the total number of names registered in ccTLDs at 152.9 million.
