While I was away covering the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Vancouver conference last week Verisign issued their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief covering the 1st quarter of 2010. This document is always chock full of interesting statistics about domain name registrations and trends. The latest brief noted that as of the end of 1Q-2010 there were over 193 million domains registered across all TLDs, a 6% jump (and 11 million more domains) compared to one year ago. 

That means the landmark 200 millionth domain registration may not be far away. In fact, in analyzing the latest Verisign brief and factoring in additional information from the 10 weeks since 1Q-2010 ended, Pingdom.com says we may have already hit the 200 million mark. An article there noted, "Two months ago, there were less than 117 million gTLDs. Now there are almost 121 million. That’s an increase of more than 4 million domain names, and that's without including the more than 240 ccTLDs that exist out there. So, if you count all top-level domains together, 200 million either is very, very close, or a number we’ve recently passed."

The 100 million registrations mark was hit in the 2nd quarter of 2006, so the web has obviously seen tremendous growth with registrations doubling over the past four years. There is so sign that is going to change any time soon either. While it's true the growth from 4Q-2009 to 1Q-2010 was less than 1%, Pingdom noted, "The weak increase in Q1 2010 (from the previous quarter) is mainly because China changed the rules for .cn registrations, which made millions of .cn domain names drop off."

Looks like an excellent idea that could eliminate the kind of bogus traffic/revenue claims that unscrupulous sellers sometime make in an effort to hoodwink unsuspecting buyers. We wish Andrew the best of luck with the useful new service. 

(Posted June 15, 2010)