Verisign, the administrator of the .com and .net registries, released their quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief (covering the 1st quarter of 2017) this week. The brief is always a must read because it encompasses all domain extensions, not just those operated by Verisign.

The company reported that approximately 1.3 million domain name registrations were added to the internet in 1Q-2017, bringing the total number of domain name registrations to approximately 330.6 million across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of March 31, 2017.

That increase represents a growth rate of 3.7% year over year (11.8 million more domains registered than at the same point in 2016). The number of registrations rose 0.4% from the previous quarter (4Q-2016). That is slower than the 6.8% year over year rate (and 1.8% increase from the previous quarter) that we saw at the end of 4Q-2016.

.Com remains, by far, the most popular TLD in the world with 128.4 million of them registered at the end of 1Q-2017. The next largest gTLD, .Net, stood at 15.2 million.  Those two combined totaled approximately 143.6 million, an increase of 0.8% year over year - still moving forward though the percentage growth rate for .com/.net combined was also a good bit slower than that of the market as a whole.

ccTTLDs (country code domains) as a group also grew more slowly than the market at large. Approximately 143.1 million ccTLD domains were registered as of March 31, up 1.7% year over year and 0.3% from 4Q-2016 (as with .com/.net, the ccTLD growth rates are down from the previous quarter's report).