Bangalore: VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), a global leader in domain names and internet security, yesterday (27 July 2016) announced that approximately 12 million domain names were added to the internet in the first quarter of 2016, bringing the total number of registered domain names to approximately 326.4 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of March 31, 2016, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

Worldwide registrations grew by 32.4 million, or 11 percent, year over year while it was  a 3.8 percent rise over the fourth quarter of 2015. The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the first quarter of 2016, reaching a combined total of approximately 142.5 million .com and .net domain names in the domain name base. This represents a 7.1 percent increase year over year. As of March 31, 2016, the domain name base of .com equaled 126.6 million names (38.8% of total domains), while .net equaled 15.9 million names (4.9% of total domains).

In the press statement Verisign said that in the first quarter, the company processed 10 million new domain name registrations for .com and .net, as compared to 8.7 million domain names for the same period in 2015. The top ten domain TLDs by zone size are as followed: .com, .tk,.cn,.de,.net,.org,.uk,.ru,.nl, .info .

Verisign informed that during the first quarter of 2016, the company’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was approximately 124 billion queries per day across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of nearly 189 billion. Quarter over quarter, the daily average query load increased 0.5 percent and the peak decreased by 2.7 percent. Year over year, the daily average query load increased by 3.5 percent, and the peak increased by 14.2 percent.