Internet absorbs more domain names, says VeriSign

INDIA: VeriSign, Inc., a player in domain names and Internet security, has announced six million domain names were added to the Internet in the first quarter of 2015, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 294 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of March 31, 2015, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The increase of six million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.9 per cent over the fourth quarter of 2014.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the first quarter of 2015, reaching a combined total of approximately 133.0 million .com and .net domain names in the domain name base. This represents a 3.1 per cent increase year over year. As of March 31, 2015, the domain name base of .com equaled 117.9 million names, while .net equaled 15.1 million names.

In the first quarter, Verisign processed 8.7 million new domain name registrations for .com and .net, as compared to 8.6 million domain names for the same period in 2014.

During the first quarter of 2015, Verisign's average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 119 billion across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 165 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average increased 8.6 percent and the peak increased 13.1 percent. Year over year, the daily average query load increased 40.2 percent and the peak query load increased 37.9 percent.

With changes to search algorithms that favor websites that look and perform better on mobile devices, non-mobile friendly website owners, including many small businesses, fear their search rankings will plummet.