Domain name registrations hit all-time high

Mountain View (CA) - Verisign reported Tuesday that more than 4.7 million new domain names were registered during the first quarter of 2004-the highest quarterly figure for new domain registrations in the history of the Internet.

The company released the figure with its quarterly domain report which states that more than 63 million domain names have now been registered, approximately one for every 100 people living in the world today. 4.7 million new registrations translate in a 21 percent increase over the first quarter of 2003.

According to Verisign, not only new registrations are more popular than during the Internet bubble. Also current base of domain names is being utilized more actively than ever before, as measured by renewal rates, look-up rates, and the percentage of domain names tied to live sites.

More than 72 percent of today’s domain names now resolve to a Web site, up from 55 percent at the height of the boom in December 2002, indicating that the speculative purchase of domain names that fueled much of the growth in the late nineties has been replaced by real Web sites and e-mail boxes, Verisign said. Total domain name resolutions for .com and .net reached an average of 11 billion per day in the first quarter.

The report also revealed an incraesing globalizating of the Internet. Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) account for a growing portion of overall domain names, and currently represent 40 percent of all domain names registered in the world.

The majority of ccTLDs are registered in Europe, including .de (Germany) and .uk (United Kingdom), which account for twelve percent and eight percent, respectively, of all domains registered in the world, according to Verisign.