Over 100 million .com registrations

ICANN, the umbrella organisation for gTLD’s, just published the numbers of the last quarter of 2011. These show that on October 31st 2011 100.540.971 .names were registered under the .com extension. In October 2011 alone, 690.243 new names were registered under this extension.

It’s remarkable Verisign itself (.com and .net registry) didn’t communicate at all about this milestone in October or November 2011. Since ICANN only receives the numbers per quarter, up until now, it wasn’t clear that Verisign exceeded the 100 million registrations.

However, according to RegistrarStats there are currently only 100.211.088 .com names registered, which is less than in October 2011. This difference can be explained by the fact that RegistrarStats doesn’t take into account .com names to which no nameservers are linked or .com names which have a special status such as ‘Pending Delete’. If those names would be taken into account, there are probably even 1.5 million more names registered under the .com extension.  But even without those 1.5 million extra names, .com remains by far the extension under which most names have been registered.