The number of domain names keeps on rising
According to numbers provided by VeriSign (the company that manages the top-level domains .com and .net), during the first quarter of 2008, over 14 million new domain names were registered worldwide, which is 17% more than during the previous quarter and 15% more on an annual basis. A total of more than 126 million registrations was observed for all Top-Level Domains (TLDs) together. 63 million of those registrations correspond to country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs), which represents an increase of 33% with respect to last year. A noteworthy fact is that the Netherlands seem to be doing very well: .nl comes in 8th, after .com, .de, .cn, .net, .uk, .org and .info; .eu and .biz. rank 9th and 10th on the list. China made a huge leap forward: in comparison with the previous quarter, the number of registrations grew with 23 %.
Many wonder how many of those registrations really lead to a website. VeriSign can also provide an answer to this question: on average, 11% of .com and .net domain names are not linked to a website. 89% of domain names lead to a website, either of several pages (67%) or of one single page (22%), e.g. ‘under construction’, a brochure or a site to park a domain on, be it to generate income from advertisements or not.