There are 192 million domains on the Internet

At the end of last year, there were 192 million domain names on the Internet across all top-level TLDs. Compared to the end of 2008, the number of domains increased by 15 million. The increase compared to the previous quarter was 2%, and compared to the same period a year earlier, it was 8%.

On average, approximately 3.7 million new domains were registered online each month. The most popular domain extensions are COM, CN, DE, NET, UK, ORG, INFO, NL (Netherlands), EU (European Union), and RU.

There are 96.7 million domain names registered in the COM and NET zones. This is 7% higher than the previous year. Registrations in these domain zones grew by 2.4 million names per month.

The fastest-growing domains last year were RU, BR (Brazil), AU (Australia), FR (France), and PL (Poland). Growth above 20% in 2009 was demonstrated by RU (37%), BR (27%), PL (26%), AU (23%), and FR (23%).

It is likely that the restrictive policies of the Chinese government have had an impact on the growth of this domain – if this domain previously showed growth at the level of tens of percent, then in the last quarter of 2009 the number of names registered here increased by only 1%.

The top ten most popular national domains are: CN, DE, UK, NL, EU, RU, AR (Argentina), BR, IT (Italy) and PL.