Domain Registration, Web Audience Rises
According to "The Domain Name Industry Brief, March 2007" released by VeriSign, there is now a base of 120 million registered domain names across all top-level domains (TLD). This is a 32% increase from the 2005 figure.
During the fourth quarter of 2006, 11.6 million new domain names were registered.
As expected, .com registrations were the most popular, followed by .de (the TLD for German sites), .net, .uk (TLD for the United Kingdom), and .org.
The base of .com and .net domain names ballooned to 65 million domain names at the end of 2006, which was helped by a 6% increase during the fourth quarter of 2006, and a 30% increase from the close of 2005.
New .com and .net domain registrations happened at an average rate of 2.1 million per month in the fourth quarter of 2006.
Country Code TLDs jumped 31% year-over-year to 43.7 million, with China adding more than 500,000 domains during the fourth quarter of 2006 alone.
This growth was sparked by increased broadband penetration, e-commerce, new business applications, and nascent means of accessing the Web away from the computer, among other things.
With the increase in domain name registrations, it should be expected that the overall Internet audience should increase as well, and this is exactly what happened according to comScore Networks’ World Metrix service.
Recent figures indicate that the Internet reaches 747 million people across the globe. India, the Russian Federation, and China grew the most during 2006. India grew 33%, the Russian Federation grew 21%, and China grew 20%.
On average, Web users in the top 10 countries in terms of Internet penetration spent more than 27 hours on the Web each month. Canadians seem to be more attached than others, spending an average of 39.6 hours on the Internet per month. Users in Israel follow with 37.4 hours, while South Koreans are third with 34 hours. Users in the U.S. spend an average of 31.6 hours online each month.
Microsoft garners the most unique set of eyes as of January 2007, with 510 million. Google is second with 502 million, while Yahoo! is third with 468 million.
Sources:
http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625196
http://www.verisign.com/press_releases/pr/page_040772.html
http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625168
