A number of organizations track the .com domain registrations without taking into consideration the complete picture, thus underestimating the current count. Our research shows that the .com count is already well past that number.
Verisign publishes a daily “zone file” of registered .com domain names with their associated nameservers. Yesterday the zone file listed 99,837548 .com domain names and that number has been growing by an average of about 22,000 net new .com domain names per day so far in 2012. But there are two general categories of domain names that exist but are not listed in the zone files.
The first category is well known, at least to people who work in and around the domain industry: domains in the Redemption or Pending Delete periods. Each day tens of thousands of .com domain names hit their renewal date. There are currently 2.1 million .com domain names in either Redemption or Pending Delete status.
The second category is much less well known, a category DomainTools refers to as ‘dark domains’. Domain names that exist, but are not pointed to nameservers, are not listed in the zone file and therefore not counted by most sites that track domain registration data. An example of such a domain is Spectrum.com; it exists but has no nameservers, and does not resolve to a website. Another example is theexpertcare.com; the Whois record indicates a fraud alert on the domain name and a ‘suspended’ status. This domain is also not in the zone file and yet is certainly not available for anyone to register.
Only Verisign knows for sure how big the list of dark domains is, but we have conducted ongoing proprietary research that reveals over 400,000 known dark .com domain names, as found in blank-nameserver.com. This count is included in the recently updated domain statistics data on our DailyChanges.com website. Our calculation of .com domains includes those listed in the zone file plus the dark domains. With that information in mind, we calculated the current total of .com domains managed by Verisign to be over 100.2 million.
100 million actively registered domains is an enormous achievement for the dominant TLD worldwide, and congratulations are in order for Verisign and the registrars which support .com.
As we all know, .com is the biggest top-level domain by a long, long way. For comparison, the next biggest gTLD today is .net with a relatively small 14 million domains. In country codes, Germany’s .de leads with almost 15 million. The closest competitor to .com among the gTLDs introduced by ICANN since the year 2000 is .info, with about eight million domains.
There’s no doubt at all that .com is the domain of choice for most of the world, but it’s taken it a long time to get to 100 million. From its creation in early 1985, it took the registry two and a half years to reach just 100 active names. It was not until 1997, in the middle of the rightly-named dot-com boom, that the one millionth concurrently active .com domain name was registered. In addition, there have been over 300 million other unique .com domain names registered and deleted since the inception of the TLD.
Our records show that the biggest growth period for active .com names came between 2005 and 2007, the height of the domain tasting craze. During this time, many domain investors used a loophole in registration rules to sample type-in traffic for free. Investors kept the domains they found that were most likely to profit from pay-per-click parking. In 2006 the .com zone grew by over 14 million names, driven by this speculation. In both 2005 and 2007, it grew by over 12 million names.
Since then, a change to ICANN’s rules means the tasting market has dropped to virtually nothing, but the .com zone continues to grow faster than it did pre-tasting, showing an increased demand for domain names as more new Internet users come online globally. In 2011, DomainTools counted almost 8 million net new active .com names added to the DNS. The number was about the same in 2010.
The big question in 2012 is: what will new gTLDs – such as .web, .music, .green, .shop, .paris, .gay and all the others, not to mention “dot-brand” domains – mean for .com? Many people believe that .com’s position is unassailable, that .com will always be king.
Will new gTLDs mean that .com will grow more slowly in future? Will companies use their new branded gTLD domains instead of buying up thousands of defensive .com registrations? Or is it more likely that for every registration in a new gTLD a company makes, it still feels the need to register a matching .com domain? Nobody knows the answers to these questions yet, but it’s going to be fun finding out!
What do you think?
The final agenda for the 2012 DOMAINfest conference - which features a list of experts who will offer opinions on many key changes that will impact the domain industry - has been announced.
DomainTools announced recently that there are more than 100 .COM domain name registrations up to date,according to their research .There are currently 100.2 million .COM domain name registrations .
Verisign,has recently announced it financial results for the fourth quarter of 2011 and year ended December 31,2011 .
SIDN,the company behind .nl domain name,announced that 2011 was a great year for them .Net growth was 607,265 domain names (14.5%): a huge increase on 2010.
Finans Bank submitted a complaint with the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center,asserting legal rights over the domain name FinansBank.xxx .
Neomobile.com domain name sold for $58,500 million through Sedo ,topped Domain Name Journal weekly sales list of reported domain names in the week to January 22,,2012 .
At an extended meeting held on 23 January, the Registrars Committee discussed prospective solutions to the problem of vacated domains registration. The Committee meeting was attended by representatives of the Technical Center of Internet (TCI) and the CC’s Council members.
Moniker and SnapNames,both Oversee.net companies will host a Premium Spring Auction,which features a world-class line up of high quality, brandable generic domain names at all price points including Low and No Reserve!
Sedo,in partnership with the .ME Registry announced an exclusive auction of premium .ME domains.The auction begins on February 2,2012 and runs for a full week,until February 9,2012 .
Domain Name conferences are very important for domainers . You can establish contacts with other domainers from the industry and learn many new things about the domain name industry .
[news release] Sedari has been engaged by the Foundation for Assistance for Internet Technologies and Infrastructure Development (FAITID), a not-for-profit Russian foundation which is preparing applications for the .MOSCOW and .MOCKBA (in Cyrillic) top-level domain names. The implementation of the new top-level domains will make possible websites with addresses such as WWW.COMPANY.MOSCOW and for museums МУЗЕИ.МОСКВА.
Neomobile.com topped Sedo's weekly sales chart at $58,500 .Highlights also include Wiglle.ru,leading the ccTLD category at 12,000 EUR and Paydayloans.info,leading the other category at $10,000 .
DistanceLearning.com domain name is now available for sale.DistanceLearning.com is a premium education domain name and ranks highly across Google,Yahoo and Bing .
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began accepting applications for new gTLDs on January 12,2012.
Nominet has announced the rules and prices they charge to registrars for multi-year registrations, with the options for registrations from one to ten years, when the new rules come into place on 1 May 2012.
.ORG,The Public Interest Registry,has appointed Nancy Gofus as Chief Operating Officer.Nancy Gofus will will oversee the marketing,sales,product and strategy functions.
SIDN,the company behind .NL domain,has recently signed a five-year contract with NLnet Labs,the Dutch internet technology expertise centre,which has a worldwide reputation for its work in the field of DNS and DNSSEC.
AFNIC is sponsoring the 83rd Meeting of the IETF - the Internet Engineering Task Force - which is being held at the Paris Palais des Congrès.
Deniz Banks submitted a complaint with the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center,asserting legal rights over the domain name DenizBank.xxx .
The number of .SE domains that were signed using the DNSSEC security standard rose from 4,299 in early 2011 to 171,650 by 31 December, 2011. The registry has attributed this to a considerable increase to a long-term strategy and a proactive initiative from .SE and several of its resellers (registrars) to enhance the security of the Internet in Sweden.
An arbitrator with the National Arbitration Forum has awarded 17 domain names to Google.The company submitted a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum on November 30, 2011,asserting legal rights over the disputed domains.
