New Delhi, April 25, 2014 – Five million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2013, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 271 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Dec. 31, 2013 according to VeriSign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
The increase of five million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.9 percent over the third quarter of 2013. Worldwide registrations have grown by 18.5 million, or 7.3 percent, year over year.
The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter of 2013, reaching a combined total of approximately 127.2 million domain names in the adjusted zone for .com and .net. This represents a 5 percent increase year over year. As of Dec. 31, 2013, the base of registered names in .com equaled 112 million names, while .net equaled 15.2 million names.
New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.2 million during the fourth quarter of 2013. In the fourth quarter of 2012, new .com and .net registrations totaled 8.0 million.
Is it likely that we will run out of domain names?
No, the number of possible second-level domain names in any TLD is an extremely large number: over 1098 (1 followed by 98 zeros). Since domain names became available for registration almost 30 years ago, not a single TLD has had even a tiny fraction of its total number of possible domain names registered, not even .com – the largest TLD at 112 million names. To help put the total TLD availability into perspective, today there are 2.5 billion Internet users around the globe. If every one of those users registered a domain name every single second for 30 million years, they would register a total of about 2.4 septillion domain names (that’s 2.4 followed by 24 zeros). And that is less than one billionth of a billionth of one percent! Therefore, it is extremely remote we will ever run out of domain names.
Find a PDF copy of the Domain Name Industry Brief here.
Find a useful infographic here