With a 31% increase year over year, the domain name market remains buoyant. There are now 146 million names registered worldwide.
.COM and .NET registry Verisign has just published its latest "Domain Name Industry Brief", showing unabated growth for domain names in the third quarter of 2007. The new total of 146 million registered names is a 6% increase over 2007's second quarter and a 31% increase over the third quarter of last year.
Verisign's figures also show strength for the Internet's country code domains (ccTLDs) with a 38% yearly increase and a total of 54.6 million registered ccTLD names. It should be noted however that while Verisign manages the .COM and .NET domains directly and therefore has precise figures for them, where ccTLds are concerned the firm depends on figures from each extension's registry. Verisign notes in its report that the gTLD and ccTLD data cited in this report are estimates to date and may change."
China charges ahead
New registrations were down slightly (7%) from the second quarter with around 12 million new names in third quarter. The slight drop in new registration numbers should be taken in the context of an exceptional second quarter and thus appears as nothing more than a blip in an upwards trend. Year on year, third quarter new registrations show a 25% increase.
Some extensions continued to rise in the third quarter despite the overall drop. Among them, .COM, .NET and .CN. The Chinese domain is one of the strongest around at the moment. Boosted by a promotion being run in China where names are almost given away, .CN is now the world's fourth domain behind .COM, .DE and .NET!
But the .CN promotion is scheduled to end at the end of December. It will be interesting to see if .CN can maintain its position after that. Previous domain giveaways have not always yielded a long-lasting increase in volume.
Renewals steady
One clear sign of the domain sector's strong health is the rate at which names are renewed. A strong renewal rate means that names are actually used and therefore likely to be kept by their owners for several years, thus providing a strong base for new overall registration records in the years to come.
Verisign's numbers show that since the first quarter of 2004, the renewal rate has never dropped below 70%. In fact, it's been extremely steady, with a low of 72% (Q1 2004) and a high of 77% (Q3 and Q4 2006). At 74%, 2007's latest renewal rates are right in that trend.
A new breed of internationalised domain
Verisign ends its quarterly report by spotlighting the industry's current work on IDNs. "Standard" IDNs have been available for registration in several extensions for a number of years now. But with this type of IDN, although the domain name can use non-English characters, the extension must remain all-ASCII (a character set limited to standard Roman numbers and letters, plus basic punctuation).
Regular Domaines.Info readers will know that work is currently being done on the next generation of IDNs: where even the extension, the characters to the right of the dot, are internationalised. Verisign dubs these new IDNs "internationalised TLDs", and we'll call them ITLDs for short.
ITLDs are set to continue the domain industry's upward trend by providing prospective registrants with even more choice in the years to come.
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