Over 200 Million Domain Names Registered — VeriSign Confirms

Domain registrations hit another milestone.

Today VeriSign released its third quarter Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf) and confirmed something I suspected by now — there are now more than 200 million domain names registered worldwide.

By VeriSign’s count, there were more than 201.8 million domain names registered at the end of September, an increase of 3.8 million over the end of June. (The firm must have revised its June number up, as it previously noted there were 196.3 million registered at the end of June.) .Com and .Net — which are managed by VeriSign — combine for 103 million domain names. ccTLDs account for 79.2 million of the total.

The numbers are impressive. Equally as impressive is that nearly a quarter of all domain names are registered at GoDaddy. It will be interesting to see if this dynamic changes with fresh top level domain names that aren’t subject to registry/registrar separation.