There were approximately 94.9 million ccTLD (country-code top level domain) registrations in the first quarter of 2012, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief. Given the average annual growth over the last four years, that number is set to exceed 100 million sometime this year.
Overall, Verisign reports that the first quarter of 2012 ended with more than 233 million domain name registrations across all TLDs. That represents an increase of 11% year over year.
ccTLD registrations up 16.2%
In terms of ccTLD registrations, 4.3 million domain names were added in the first quarter of the year, representing a 16.2% increase from the same period a year ago.
Based on the average year over year growth in ccTLDs from the first quarter of 2008 to the corresponding quarter this year we predict that by early 2013, there will be 105 million ccTLD registrations.
That means, in all likelihood, that sometime this year the total number of ccTLD registrations would exceed 100 million.
The top 10 ccTLDs, listed below, represent 60% of all registrations:
- .de (Germany)
- .uk (United Kingdom)
- .tk (Tokelau)
- .nl (Netherlands)
- .ru (Russian Federation)
- .eu (European Union)
- .cn (China)
- .br (Brazil)
- .ar (Argentina)
- .au (Australia)
In total there are now more than 290 ccTLDs. With 207 sovereign states in the world, that’s an impressive number.
More domain tidbits to come
That’s just one tidbit we got from the latest Verisign report, and we’ll come back to more interesting developments in the world of domains in more articles, in the near future.
For now, we’ll leave you with this prediction of ccTLDs.
Image (top) via Shutterstock.
