VeriSign: 12 Million Domains Registered in Q1 2016
The total number of registered domains across all TLDs reached 326.4 million, growing 12 million, or 3.8 percent from Q4 2015, according to the Q1 2016 Domain Name Industry Brief from VeriSign. Year-over-year registrations increased by 32.4 million, or 11 percent.
The number of internet sites redirecting to popular social media and ecommerce sites rose significantly over the past year.
SEE ALSO: New TLDs Growing as Over 3 Million Domain Names Added in Q3: VeriSign
VeriSign processed 10 million new .com and .net registrations in the quarter, up from 8.7 million in the first quarter of 2015.
The number of .com and .net sites redirecting to LinkedIn increased by 35 percent, while the number leading to Amazon.com, Etsy, Facebook and Twitter were all between 23 and 30 percent. The number of sites redirecting to Chinese social media site Weibo jumped 49 percent.
The report cites DN Journal aftermarket sale price tracking, which shows the top 10 .com domain names resold for an average of $315,800 in Q1 2016. Two years ago Sedo reported the third highest price for a public .com domain sale in the first half of 2014 was $320,000 for malls.com.
VeriSign’s daily DNS query load increased by 0.5 percent, but the peak actually decreased by 2.7 percent, though the year-over-year query load increased by 3.5 and 14.2 percent, respectively. By contrast, the query load jumped by 8 percent as a daily average and 225 percent at peak from Q2 to Q3 2015, resulting in 4.8 and 86.4 percent year-over-year increases.
Source: TheWHIR