The latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign shows in the final quarter of last year, registrations of all Top Level Domains (TLDs) grew by 2.7 percent since the third quarter.

Q4 last year was a huge one for domain name registration. The quarter closed with more than 225 million registered names, which was 10% more than the same quarter in 2010.

The leaderboard now in terms of domain extension popularity remained unchanged from 2011 Q3, with .com still the leader; followed by de (Germany), .net, .uk (United Kingdom), .org, .info, .tk (Tokelau), .nl (Netherlands), .ru (Russian Federation) and .eu (European Union).
The popularity of .tk continues to puzzle some given Tokelau has a tiny population. As we mentioned in an earlier article, a Dutch firm bought the rights to .tk and now provides free domain registration of the extension.

While on the topic of country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs), the top ccTLD registries by domain name base for the final quarter of last year reported by Verisign were:

1. .de – Germany
2. .uk – United Kingdom
3. .tk – Tokelau
4. .nl – Netherlands
5. .ru – Russian Federation
6. .eu – European Union
7. .cn – China
8. .br – Brazil
9. .ar – Argentina
10. .it – Italy

Verisign says there are now 290 ccTLD extensions globally and the top 10 ccTLDs account for 60 percent of all registrations.

Verisign manages two of the world’s 13 Internet root name servers and according to the latest Brief, its average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the fourth quarter of 2011 was 64 billion, peaking at 117 billion. This represented a daily average increase of 8 percent and a peak increase of 51 percent. Year on year, the increase was 2% and 59% respectively.