Latest Report Counts 314 Million Registered Domain Names Worldwide

VeriSign, Inc. announced that approximately 15 million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2015, bringing the total number of registered domain names to approximately 314 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Dec. 31, 2015, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The increase of approximately 15 million domains globally equates to a growth rate of 5% over the third quarter of 2015. Worldwide registrations have grown by 25.9 million, or 9%, year over year.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter of 2015, reaching a combined total of approximately 139.8 million .com and .net domain names in the domain name base. This represents a 6.3% increase year over year. As of Dec. 31, 2015, the domain name base of .com equaled 124 million names, while .net equaled 15.8 million names.

In the fourth quarter, Verisign processed 12.2 million new domain name registrations for .com and .net, as compared to 8.2 million domain names for the same period in 2014.

In the fourth quarter of 2015, the top 10 TLDs in order by zone size were:

Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) reached 144.4 million domain names at the end of Q4 2015, with an increase of 6.6 million domain names, or a 4.8% increase compared to the third quarter of 2015. As of Dec. 31, 2015, the top 10 ccTLDs by zone size were:

At the end of Q4 2015, new gTLD (ngTLDs) registrations totaled 10.9 million, which represents 3.5% of total domain name registrations. The top 10 ngTLDs represented 51.9% of all ngTLD domain name registrations. The following charts show ngTLD domain name registrations as a percentage of overall TLD domain name registrations, and also the top 10 ngTLDs as a percentage of all ngTLD domain name registrations.