New Verisign Report Shows .Com and .Net Registrations Down Again in 2024 -  ccTLDs and Non .Com gTLDs Both Up

 VeriSign, (the administrator of the .com and .net TLDs) has released their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) covering the 4th quarter of 2024. This update showed that the total number of domain registrations across all TLDs worldwide ended the most recent quarter at 364.3 million. That is up 4.4 million registrations year over year representing a 1.2% increase. Almost half of that jump came from a surge in the final quarter of 2024 when 2 million domains were added.

.Com remains, by far, the dominant TLD on the Internet but .com's total number of registrations continued a recent trend of slipping from the previous year. With 156.3 million domains at the end of 4Q-2024, .com was down about 3.3 million from the same point in 2023 - a 2% decline. .Net has slowly ebbed as well. .Net was down by 400,000 domains YOY to 12.7 million at the end of 2024, a 3% drop.

ccTLDs finished 4Q-2024 with 140.8 million registrations, 2.5 million more than a year ago, representing a 1.8% increase YOY. New gTLDs enjoyed the largest jump but, being newer, they are working from a much smaller user base than the .coms and ccTLDs. Still, by adding 5 million domains the new Gs hit 36.8 million domains at the end of 4Q-2024, giving them an impressive 15.9% increase year over year. 

For legacy gTLDs not including .com and .net, registrations stood at 17.6 million at the end of 2024, an increase of 535,000 domains year over year, a 3.1% increase for that group.

(Posted Feb. 7, 2025)  

*****