Total Domain Name Registrations Surpass 193 Million in First Quarter of 2010

The Internet grew by a million domain names in the first quarter of 2010, ending the quarter with a base of more than 193 million domain name registrations across all of the Top-Level Domains, according to Internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign.

The latest Domain Name Industry Brief from VeriSign reports that the total base of top-level domains grew 6 percent over the past 12 months. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2009, domain name registrations grew 0.6 percent, however, the overall base of .com and .net domain names grew 2.7 percent.

In the first quarter of 2010, new .com and .net registrations were added at an average of approximately 2.7 million per month for a total of 8.1 million new registrations in the quarter. The renewal rate for the first quarter of 2010 was 72 percent, a slight increase from the Q4 2009 figure of 71.2 percent, although renewal rates may deviate a few percentage points in either direction, based upon the composition of the expiring base and the contribution of specific registrars.

VeriSign's average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during first quarter 2010 was 54 billion per day with peaks as high as 63.2 billion per day. Compared to fourth quarter 2009, the daily query average and the daily peak queries both saw an increase of 4 percent. Taken annually, the daily average increased 41 percent and the peak daily queries grew 43 percent.

Interestingly, the latest Domain Name Industry Brief draws attention to a new study, "The Internet Economy 25 Years After .com: Transforming Commerce & Life," by Washington, DC-based think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Drawing upon a variety of research sources to gauge the commercial impact of the Internet, the ITIF estimates that the annual global economic benefits of the commercial Internet is equal to $1.5 trillion -- a figure greater than the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy, and government investment in R&D -- combined.

"As the ITIF study affirms, the commercial Internet has been a transformational force in the world for the past quarter century," VeriSign naming services senior vice president Raynor Dahlquist said in a statement. "To ensure it continues to drive the evolution of entire industries, it's vital to make strategic and continuous investments in the Internet infrastructure. With Project Apollo, VeriSign is building the infrastructure it believes is essential to manage the Internet's next wave of growth."

Earlier this year, VeriSign launched Project Apollo, a 10-year initiative to strengthen and scale the .com and .net infrastructure. In order for the Internet to continue its essential role in today's economy and in society itself, VeriSign envisions today's current infrastructure capacity growing 1,000 times, enabling it to process four quadrillion queries per day by 2020.