An abundance of domains: 246 million web domains now registered

The Internet has an abundance of web domains. Verisign reported that there were 246 million domain names registered by the third quarter of 2012.

This figure represents a 12 percent year-over-year increase in domain name registration.

Certainly .com domains continue to hold the top position in website domain registration. Country code top-level domains (ccTLD) are growing faster though--with a growth of 18 percent. The popular .com and .net actually declined by 1.1 percent on a year-over-year basis.

• 105 million registered domain names in the .com TLD
  
• .net domain registry now comprizes 14.9 million names
• country code top-level domains (ccTLD) total 104.9 million

These figures show part of the story of the remarkable growth of the web. New websites and apps spring to life daily to market organizations, bring people together, sell products and connect people world-wide.  ICANN is planning to expand the number of top level domains (TLDs)and this new VeriSign report shows  both the dominance of .com web domains and the expansion of ccTLDs.