Internet Grows to 288 Million Domain Names in the Q4 of 2014 Adding 4 Million Domains

Verisign, the .com and .net registry, released the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief, which showed that the Internet grew by 4 million domain names in the fourth quarter of 2014. The total number of domain names across all top-level domains (TLDs) is now 288 million. This is a 1.3 percent increase over the third quarter of 2014.

.com and .net Breakdown

New .COM and .net registrations totaled 8.2 million, bringing the combined number of .COM and .net TLDs to 130.6 million domain names in the domain name base by the end of the fourth quarter of 2014.

gTLD Breakdown

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2014, 478 new gTLDs were delegated into the root; with 65 new gTLDs delegated during the fourth quarter of 2014.

The chart below captures the initial 60-day registration volume rank for those new gTLDs reaching 60 days of General Availability (GA) during the quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2014, 78 new gTLDs reached 60 days of GA and of those, the 10 largest new gTLDs, as measured by zone size at the end of the quarter, were:

Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) reached 134.0 million domain names. The top 10 ccTLD registries by domain name base were:

DNS Query Load

Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the fourth quarter of 2014 was 110 billion across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 146 billion. Year over year, the daily average increased 33.5 percent and the peak increased 47.1 percent.

For more domain stats from the fourth quarter of 2014, check out the infographic below and the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief.