Internet domains rise over six per cent in 2010

The number of registered internet domains rose by 6.3 per cent last year to 205.3 million, according to new figures from VeriSign.

Around 3.5 million original domain names were registered in the last quarter of 2010, up 1.7 per cent on the previous quarter. Just over half of the registered domains were .com or .net, and .de was the most popular country-specific URL.

There was considerable interest in .com and .net addresses overall, but growth in country-specific domains remained nearly static at just 0.3 per cent over the year.

VeriSign's average daily Domain Name System query load in the last quarter of 2010 was 61 billion, a rise of 17 per cent on the year, and exceeded 72 billion on the busiest days.

The company used the end-of-year results to launch a competition for small businesses to come up with new business plans around .com and .net addresses.

Companies with fewer than 15 employees are eligible, and the prize is $25,000 in local currency.

"VeriSign designed the contest to reward creative small businesses that are leveraging the global power of the .com and .net brands, where the world is your domain," said Dave Stewart, vice president of strategic partners at VeriSign.

Prizes will be awarded for the most creative plans, and the American and Canadian contests are already online.

Contests are also planned for Mexico, Brazil, Germany, France, the UK, Poland, Turkey, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

"We are going to be working with 600 distributors to grow awareness and drive some traffic," Stewart said at the DEMO 2011 conference.