Verisign has released the latest edition of its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB), one of the most authoritative sources of information on the state of the domain industry. The report sums up the results of the Q2 of this year and states that as of June 30, the number of registrations in all domain zones reached 356.6 million. This is 1.7 million more than in the Q1, and 4.3 million more than the same period last year.
The Domain Incite, reporting this news, draws attention to a certain oddity in the report. For reasons that remain unexplained, it does not include the results of 10 domain zones - .AERO, .ASIA, .CAT, .COOP, .GOV, .MUSEUM, .PRO, .TEL, .TRAVEL and .XXX. These domains are not “old” and at the same time were delegated even before the start of the first stage of the new domains program in 2012. Their statistics are quite accessible, and taking them into account, the growth compared to the 1st quarter would have been not 1.7 million, but 2.6. However, for some reason the compilers of the report ignored them.
If we talk about domain zones managed by Verisign itself, they continue to experience difficult times. .COM and .NET domains showed a decrease compared to the Q1. The number of registrations in the .COM domain zone decreased from 161.6 million to 161.3 million, and in the .NET domain zone - from 13.2 million to 13.1 million. At the same time, national domain zones and new gTLDs showed growth. The number of registrations in national domains reached 137 million, an increase of 1.1 million over 3 months. And new domains added 0.8 million names and reached a total of 28.1 million registrations.
