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By: OpenSRS Team on March 8th, 2007
Posted in: Industry News
Tags: .MOBI
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Speaking of domain name statistics, here's an interesting one: the .mobi registry is reporting that since its launch in October 2006, 400,000 .mobi domain names have been registered.

The press release has a boast-by-comparison: it states that in the first ten years of its life, the .com domain saw only 100,000 domains registered. Keep in mind that the ten-year span of which they speak is the period from 1985 to 1995. To give some perspective: this timeline of computer history says that in 1986, one year after the creation of the .com TLD, there were 30 million computers in use — and there was no ISP industry back then. Now consider the size of the mobile phone platform before .mobi months before the availability of .mobi: this article from May 2006 says that the worldwide total of mobile phone subscribers was 1.8 billion. That's a platform three orders of magnitude larger.

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By: OpenSRS Team on March 8th, 2007
Posted in: Industry News
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There are some interesting domain name statistics contained within the latest edition of Verisign's quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief [808KB PDF]. I've taken some of the numbers contained within and turned them into graphs, which are shown below:

If you think that people have stopped registering new domain names, think again. At the end of 2003, there were just shy of 60 million domain names registered. By the end of 2006, that number had doubled to 120 million:

A shade more than 3 in 4 names are being renewed; in the last quarter of 2006, the renewal rate was 77%:

Verisign did an analysis of about 67 million .com and .net domains to see what web sites “lived” on them. If sites with multiple web pages are to be considered “live”,

• 63% had “live” sites”
• 23% had “parked” (or were single-page sites)
• 14% had no site at all

There was a big jump in international character domain names — from the end of 2005 to the end of 2006, their number increased by 89%, a near doubling:

For more information, download the Domain Name Industry Brief.