Verisign has published the latest edition of its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB), which is considered one of the most authoritative sources of information on the state of the domain industry. The new issue sums up the results of the Q4 of 2022 and the entire last year. According to Verisign, as of December 31, a total of 350.4 million domain names were registered across all domain zones. This is 8.7 million or 2.6% more than a year earlier.
The number of registrations in the gTLDs .COM and .NET managed by Verisign was 173.8 million. There are over 160.5 million in the .COM domain and just over 13.3 million in the .NET. Compared to the Q4 of last year, the .COM and .NET zones showed a slight cumulative growth - by 0.3 million registrations, which corresponds to 0.2%. However, compared to the Q3 of 2022, a decrease of 0.4 million registered names or 0.2% was recorded. The number of new registrations in the two domain zones was 9.7 million in Q4, which is lower than in the last quarter of 2021, when the number of new registrations reached 10.6 million.
The top five ccTLDs by number of registrations are .CN, .DE, .UK, .NL, and .RU (note that the.TK ccTLD of Tokelau is not included in the Domain Name Industry Brief because names registered under this domain zone are free, they are not erased after registration, and the Freenom registry publishes statistics with a low degree of accuracy.). The total number of registrations across all ccTLDs reached 133.1 million as of December 31, 2022. The growth compared to the same period last year amounted to 5.7 million names, which corresponds to 4.5%.
New gTLDs ended last year with 27.4 million registered names. This is 2.7 million registrations or 11.1% more than at the end of 2021. Thus, it was the new domains that showed the highest growth rates in percentage terms. However, all new domain zones still account for less than 8% of the total number of domain names registered in the world. The leaders in the number of registrations among new domains are .XYZ, .ONLINE and .TOP.
