4.5 million domain names were added to the global total of domain names registered across all top level domains in quarter one 2011, an increase of 2.2 per cent on the previous quarter, Verisign announced in their latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

In total at the end of March there were 209.8 million domain names registered. Over the previous 12 months, the increase was 15.3 million or 7.9 per cent.

Verisign, the registry for .COM and .NET domain names, also claims a combined total of 108 million for both TLDs, an increase of 8.3 million registrations or 9.2 per cent year on year and 2.7 per cent for the quarter, both more than the global average across all TLDs. Verisign do not separate out .COM and .NET registrations, but there would be approximately 95 million .COM registrations going by a graph in the report.

Overall, .COM was by far the largest TLD ahead of .DE (Germany) with 14,418,279 registrations. In third was .NET with approximately 13 million registrations, then .ORG (who celebrated 9 million registrations in early March), .UK (United Kingdom - 9,373,754), .INFO, .NL (Netherlands - 4,478,495), .EU (European Union - 3,363,182), .CN (China - 3,379,441) and rounding out the top ten was .RU (Russian Federation - 3,300,781).

All ccTLD statistics, with the exception of .CN are as of 25 May. Registration statistics for .CN were last issued as of 28 February, and given the downward decline over the last year or so, it is highly likely they would be tenth at best.

Registrations of country code Top Level Domains increased by 2.1 per cent for the quarter, and 5.1 per cent for the year, to 81.7 million domain names. The ten largest ccTLDs were .DE, .UK, .NL, .EU, .CN, .RU, .BR (Brazil), .AR (Argentina), .IT (Italy) and .PL (Poland).

Renewal rates for .COM and .NET domain names also increased for the first quarter of 2011, increasing to 73.8 per cent, up from 72.7 percent for the fourth quarter. Renewal rates vary quarter over quarter based on the composition of the expiring name base and the contribution of specific registrars.

Verisign's also reports on the average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the quarter. In quarter one this was 57 billion, with a peak of 67 billion. Compared to the same timeframe in 2010, the daily average and the peak each grew six per cent.

source from DomainNews