In 2010, the number of active domains reached 196 million.

OVER 196 MILLION DOMAIN NAMES REGISTERED

The second quarter of 2010 ended with in excess of 196 million domain names being currently registered. That works out to one for every 34 people on the planet.

Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief for September 2010 states there were 196.3 million domain name registrations across all Top Level Domains at the end of the period. This result represents an increase of more than 3 million domain names over the first quarter and 12.3 million over the past year.

The .com and .net top level domain extensions make up over 100 million registrations, growing by 7.9 million during the quarter.

Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) registrations reached 76.3 million domain names, just a slight increase quarter over quarter, but a 2.5 percent jump year over year. Russian Federation, Brazil, Poland, France and Australian domain names; all members of the top 20 ccTLD club, exceeded 20 percent year over year growth.

The largest TLDs in terms of base sizewere .com, .de, .net, .uk, .org, .cn, .info, .nl, .eu and .ru respectively.

The .com and .net domain registration renewal rate for the second quarter was 73.2 percent, up by just under 1% from the first quarter.

Verisign says its average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the period was a staggering 62.5 billion; over 723,000 requests a second. Compared to the same timeframe in 2009, the daily average grew 28 percent.