RESTON, Va. – The .com and .net domain spaces may be growing long in the tooth, but they remain by far the most popular on the internet, according to second-quarter 2017 statistics released by Verisign.
Verisign operates the domain registries for .com and .net. The company also owns two of the internet’s root servers and performs the root zone maintainer function for the core of the internet’s Domain Name System.
As of June 30, 331.9 million top-level domains (TLDs) had been registered globally. Of those, 144.3 million — or almost half — were in the .com and .net spaces. The .com domain name base totaled 129.2 million registrations, and .net totaled 15.1 million registrations.
Country-code TLD (ccTLD) registrations totaled approximately 144.2 million at the end of June. The top 10 ccTLDs were .cn (China), .tk (Tokelau), .de (Germany), .uk (United Kingdom), .ru (Russian Federation), .nl (Netherlands), .br (Brazil), .eu (European Union), .au (Australia) and .fr (France). As of June 30, there were 302 global ccTLD extensions delegated in the root, including Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), with the top 10 ccTLDs composing 64.8 percent of all ccTLD domain name registrations.
As of June 30, generic top-level domains (gTLDs) — like .xxx, .adult, .blog, .church, .name, etc. — totaled 24.3 million domain name registrations, representing 7.3 percent of total domain name registrations. The top 10 gTLDs — .xyz, .top, .loan, .club, .win, .online, .vip, .wang, .bid and .site — represented 61.5 percent of all gTLD domain name registrations.
Approximately 1.3 million domain name registrations were added to the internet in the second quarter of 2017. The global increase equates to a growth rate of 0.4 percent over the first quarter of 2017. Domain name registrations grew by 6.7 million, or 2.1 percent, year over year.
New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 9.2 million during the second quarter of 2017. In the second quarter of 2016, new .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 8.6 million.
According to DN Journal, the average sale price for the top 10 .com domain names sold in the aftermarket during the second quarter of 2017 was U.S. $917,000.
The top 10 keywords in the .com domain space during Q2 2017 were, in order, coin, crypto, jumbo, fidget, spinner, smiles, rates, purchase, dentists and financing. In the .net space during the same period, the top 10 keywords were coin, fashion, tube, crypto, viral, soccer, fidget, football, library and yesterday.
