Verisign released their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief (.pdf file), covering 2Q-2014 this week and it contained a lot of good news. The operator of the .com and .net registries reported that 18.6 million domain names across all extensions have been added since the end of the same quarter a year ago - a healthy 7.2% year over year jump. 

That brought  the total number of domain name  registrations worldwide to over 280 million. 4 million domains were added in the 2nd quarter alone, a 1.4% boost from the previous quarter. 

Percentage-wise, the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) performed even better than the market as a whole, growing 11.5% year over year to a total of  129.3 million domain names.

Verisign's .com and .net TLDs also continued to grow. The two extension, combined, totaled 128.9 million at the end of 2Q-2014, 3.7% higher than one year ago.  .Com, the world's most popular extension, accounted for the bulk of those with 113.7 million registrations. .Net stood at 15.2 million domains making it the 4th most popular in the world. Tokelau's .tk (which is given away free) was #2  and Germany's popular cctLD, .de, #4. China's .cn rounded out the first five (up two notches from the previous quarter, pushing Great Britain's .co.uk down a notch to 6th and .org to 7th).