There were 223 million domains worldwide in the first quarter.

The number of domains in the .COM domain extension increased by 2.5%, while the number of domains in the .NET domain increased by 8.1%. The total number of domains in .COM and .NET reached 116.7 million. 88% of sites are delegated and operational, while 12% are merely parked. Of the active domain names, 17% are single-page sites or link farms.

The number of national ccTLDs (country-code top-level domains) increased more rapidly over the quarter. In the first quarter of 2012, 4.3 million new national top-level domains were registered. This is 4.8% more than in the fourth quarter of 2011. National domains (ccTLDs) account for 95 million, which is 16.2% more than a year ago. The most popular ccTLD is the German domain .DE, followed by domains from the United Kingdom (.UK), Tokelau (.TK), the Netherlands (.NL), Russia (.RU), the European Union (.EU), China (.CN), Brazil (.BR), Argentina (.AR), and Australia (.AU).

Regarding national language domains (IDNs, or Internationalized Domain Names), ICANN has currently approved approximately 30 applications for IDNs. The leading IDN domain is the Russian Cyrillic domain .РФ, with approximately 811,000 registered domain names.

Here are some charts to help you visualize the state of the domain name market.

Dynamics of domain name registrations at the end of the first quarter

Dynamics of growth in the number of new domain name registrations

Growth in the number of country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registrations