Bean Blog

Approximately 11 million new domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2009, an eight percent increase in new registrations from Q3 2009.

 (Source: VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief PDF)

This brings the total of registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names to 192 million, so it’s expected to cross the 200 million milestone in Q1 or Q2 2010. Not surprisingly, .com domains lead the pack, followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany) and .net.

VeriSign’s average daily DNS query load during the fourth quarter of 2009 was 52 billion per day with peaks as high as 61 billion per day, jumping 48 percent for the daily average and 31 percent increase for peak daily queries as compared to fourth quarter 2008.

While there are likely a large number of these domain names that are parasitic (i.e., typo squatters, search engine bait, spam), these are still astronomical numbers.

And to think that I used to have to explain to customer prospects back in 1997 what a website was and what it might do for their companies…