New Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief Shows Dip for .Com & Net While ccTLDs & New gTLDs Rise

 VeriSign, (the administrator of the .com and .net TLDs) has released their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) covering the 4th quarter of 2023. This update showed that the total number of domain registrations across all TLDs worldwide ended the year at 359.8 million. That is a jump of 8.9 million more from the same point a year earlier, representing a 2.5% year-over-year increase for all TLDs combined.

.Com remains, by far, the dominant TLD on the Internet but .com's total number of registrations has edged down slightly each of the past two years. .Com closed 2023 with 159.6 million registrations, down from 160.5 million the previous year (a 0.6% decrease). Verisign's .net was also down a bit, dropping about 100,000 registrations to finish 2023 with 13.1 million in effect (a 0.75% decline).

The news was better on the ccTLD and new gTLD fronts. The ccTLDs continued to enjoy a healthy growth rate, moving up 4% year over year after adding 5.3 million registrations to reach 138.3 million at the end of 2023.

New gTLDs, as a group, enjoyed the highest annual growth rate, up 15.9%, but that is from a much smaller base than .coms or ccTLDs. The new Gs added 4.4 million registrations in 2023 to finish the year with 31.8 million in effect. Over half of those came from the 10 most popular TLDs from a crowded field of more than 1,000 extensions.  

(Posted February 20, 2024)  

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