The number of domain names registered around the world grew by 2.2 million, or 0.8 percent, to 296 million at the end of June according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign.

With similar growth, the 300 million mark should be reached around the end of 2015. Worldwide registrations have grown by 16.4 million, or 5.9 percent, year over year.

The growth, the envy of many industries, was a marked slowdown from the first quarter when six million domains were added to the base of registered domain names. And it was also a marked slowdown compared to the same quarter in 2014 where registrations grew 1.4 percent or four million and year-on-year registrations grew 7.2 percent

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the second quarter of 2015, reaching a combined total of approximately 133.5 million .com and .net domain names in the domain name base. This represents a 3.1 percent increase year over year, an increase that is solely at the hands of .com as .net registrations have stabilised at around the 15 million registrations mark, down from a peak of 15.2 million around a year ago.

The .net TLD is suffering somewhat at the hands of the new gTLDS, as are several other gTLDs and .us which have seen registrations decline since their introduction. But new gTLDs currently only account for two percent of all registrations or 5.8 million as of the end of June. Of the new gTLDs .xyz accounts for 13.7 percent of this 5.8 million, making it still by far the largest.

For ccTLDs the largely free .tk (Tokelau) ccTLD is still the largest while second remains .de (Germany) which recently passed the 16 million registrations mark. Rounding out the top ten ccTLDs were cn (China), .uk (United Kingdom), .ru (Russian Federation), .nl (Netherlands), .eu (European Union), .br (Brazil), .au (Australia) and .fr (France).

If a top ten of all TLDs is compiled .com is by far the largest, .net slots into fourth place, .org into seventh and .info tenth. The top ten then would be com, .tk, .de, .net, .cn, .uk, .org, .ru, .nl and .info.

In the second quarter, Verisign processed 8.7 million new domain name registrations for .com and .net, as compared to 8.5 million domain names for the same period in 2014.

During the second quarter of 2015, Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 111 billion across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 182 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average decreased 7.1 percent and the peak increased 10.2 percent. Year over year, the daily average query load increased 16.6 percent and the peak query load decreased by 10.8 percent.

To download the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, or even any recent ones in their archive, go to:
www.verisign.com/en_US/innovation/dnib/index.xhtml