Verisign has released its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief report. As of September 30, there were 362.3 million domain names registered across all generic and country code top-level domains (TLDs). This represents a decrease of approximately 100,000 registrations compared to the second quarter. However, when compared to the same period last year, the domain name space still showed growth of 0.8%, or 3 million registrations.
The generic TLDs .COM and .NET domains managed by Verisign continued their decline. The combined number of registrations in these domain zones reached 169.6 million in the third quarter, a decrease of 1.1 million names or 0.6% compared to Q2 2024. In a year-on-year comparison, the decline was 4.4 million registrations, or 2.5%. The number of new registrations also decreased: while in the third quarter of 2023 it was 9.9 million for .COM and .NET, it was only 9.3 million a year later.
The results of country code TLDs look relatively positive against this backdrop. The number of registrations in ccTLDs is estimated at 140.1 million, which is 100,000 or almost 0.05% higher than in the previous quarter, and 2 million or 1.4% higher than a year ago. The top five countries by the number of registrations as of the end of September were China (.CN), Germany (.DE), the United Kingdom (.UK), Russia (.RU), and the Netherlands (.NL).
New generic TLDs demonstrated the most significant growth, an impressive 17.4% compared to the previous year. They added 5.2 million registrations, bringing the total number of registered names to 35.4 million. However, their share still does not reach even one-tenth of the entire market, and therefore, their progress did not have a significant impact on the overall picture of the quarter, which can hardly be called very optimistic.
