Approximately 11 million new domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2009, an eight percent increase in new registrations from the third quarter of 2009. The increase has brought the total of registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names to 192 million, an increase of nearly 15 million domain name registrations since the close of 2008. That means we’ll likely cross the 200 million milestone this or next quarter, provided growth continues.The numbers come from VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief .In Q4 2009, the base of domain name registrations grew by two percent over the third quarter of 2009 and eight percent over the fourth quarter of 2008.According to the Industry Brief, the base of Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) rose to 78.6 million domain names, a three percent increase quarter over quarter and a 10 percent increase year over year. In terms of total registrations, .com unsurprisingly continues to have the highest base followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany) and .net.VeriSign’s average daily DNS query load during the fourth quarter of 2009 was 52 billion per day with peaks as high as 61 billion per day, jumping 48 percent for the daily average and 31 percent increase for peak daily queries as compared to fourth quarter 2008.

Source : TechCrunch.com
Author : Robin Wauters

Sedo, a domain marketplace, has brokered the largest sale of a .org domain to date. Brokered on behalf of National A-1 Advertising, the domain poker.org was sold to PokerCompany.com for the sum of $1 million. Prior to the sale of poker.org, the highest .org sale was $198,000 for engineering.org, followed by sexe.org which sold for $151,400. The sale price for poker.org is smaller than those of some of the largest .com sales, which rang in at $5.1 million for Toys.com, and $3 Million for the candy.com sale. Edit: Sex.com was the largest .com sale at $14M. Fund.com was notable in that it sold for $10 million.

Domain registrations for .org’s have risen recently, up 11% in the first half of 2009 over the same period a year before according to pir.org Currently there are over 7 million .org domain registrations, making .org’s the third largest domain extension, trailing only .com and .net.

Source: TechCrunch.com
Author: David Diaz