14 DAY TRIAL // During the first quarter of 2011, 4.5 million new domain names have been added. According to a report from VeriSign, there are now 209.8 million registered domains on the internet. The .com top level domain name continued to dominate, followed by .de and .net.
"The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the first quarter, surpassing a combined total of 108 million names. New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.3 million during the quarter," the report (PDF) read.
"This is a 9.2 percent increase year over year in new registrations, and 2.7 percent increase from the fourth quarter," it added.
The top ten most popular TLDs, which account for 61 percent of domain names online, have seen some movement in the fist quarter. The .uk domain name grew faster than .org and overtook it for the fourth spot.
Meanwhile .cn registrations dropped, leaving the country code top level domain in the ninth spot, overtaken by .nl and .eu.
"The first quarter of 2011 closed with a base of more than 209.8 million domain name registrations across all Top Level Domains (TLDs), an increase of 4.5 million domain names, or 2.2 percent over the fourth quarter. Registrations have grown by 15.3 million, or 7.9 percent over the past year," the report added.
In terms of only ccTLDs, there are now a total of 81.7 million registered domains. That's a 2.1 percent increase over the previous quarter and a 5.1 percent increase over the same period last year. Germany's .de is the largest ccTLD, and the second most used TLD overall, followed by .uk, .nl, .eu and .cn.
VeriSign's numbers differ from what other organizations and companies report, but it is due to the methodology and what exactly is being measured. For example, Netcraft found that there were 324.7 million hostnames at the end of April.