Domain Name Industry Brief & DNIB Data

The statistical record of who owns the internet's namespace, one reporting period at a time. The Domain Name Industry Brief is the quarterly report series in which Verisign - the registry operator for .com and .net - publishes headline counts of domain name registrations across all top-level domains, the size of the .com and .net base, ccTLD and gTLD breakdowns and year-over-year growth. The series has run since the late 1990s; since June 2023 it has been complemented by interactive dashboards carrying monthly updates: a Global Domain Name Base Trends view, a gTLD Registration and Renewal Trends view, and Security, Stability and Resiliency indicators tracking DNS traffic volumes. The methodology matters more than usual here, because the definitions are auditable against filings. The .com and .net domain name base is defined as the active zone plus registered-but-not-configured names plus names in client or server hold - the same definition Verisign uses when reporting registration data in its SEC filings, so every figure reconciles to a regulated disclosure. Figures beyond Verisign's own registries come from root-zone-file analysis rather than self-reporting, which keeps roughly 330 monitored TLDs on one comparable footing. The frame has moved with the industry: September 2023 added 16 TLDs (.aq, .ax, .cw, .ss, .su, .sx plus ten sponsored gTLDs), and the Freenom ccTLDs (.tk/.cf/.ga/.gq/.ml) drop out of the series from April 2022 onward - both facts you want inside your model rather than discovering in a footnote.

Inside the interactive media services data hub, this is the supply-side layer: registries count what exists, while popularity rankings measure what gets used. Get a sample of this dataset and put the quarterly rows next to your own TLD book.

One row per reporting period per TLD group, so the whole namespace reads as a small, dense panel. Rows shaped like these:

quarter    tld_group     registrations   qoq_change   yoy_change   renewal_pct
2026 Q2    all TLDs      368,900,000+    +0.9%        +3.9%        74.5%
2026 Q2    .com base     156,200,000+    +0.4%        +2.7%        73.1%
2026 Q2    ccTLDs        139,800,000+    +1.2%        +4.1%        76.8%
2026 Q2    new gTLDs     38,400,000+     +2.8%        +12.4%       48.9%
2026 Q2    legacy gTLDs  ...             ...          ...          ...

(Values above illustrate row shape; confirmed sample rows accompany your request.)

The structural story sits in the spread between those groups. New gTLDs grow at double-digit year-over-year rates while renewing at rates far below the .com base - a cohort that adds names fast and loses them almost as fast, which is why any gTLD growth claim without its renewal column is half a claim. The .com base moves in fractions of a percent per quarter because it is bounded by the same definition Verisign reports to the SEC, making it the closest thing the domain industry has to a monetary-aggregate series. And the ccTLD block, carried alongside its internationalized equivalents, is where regional internet policy shows up as arithmetic.

Six core measures ride along with every reporting period; the dictionary below pins down the ones that do the analytical work. Definitions carry their provenance inside them - the .com/.net base definition matches Verisign's SEC-filing language verbatim, which is precisely what makes the series joinable to regulatory disclosures.

Additional fields on request. Beyond the six documented measures, the dashboards carry finer cuts - the ten largest gTLDs by reported domain names, per-TLD renewal detail where sufficient data exists, SSR indicator series covering DNS traffic volumes, and monthly dashboard observations distinct from the quarterly print. Each gets pinned down against your sample before you commit, so the dictionary you buy is the dictionary you tested.

• Geo: Global namespace, with regional commentary drawn through a ccTLD lens; country-level behavior arrives via country-code groups and their internationalized equivalents rather than per-country columns.
• Temporal: A quarterly archive of roughly 66 reports reaching back to Q1 2010 on the current site, with the series itself dating to the late 1990s as Volume 1; dashboard series extend monthly and carry historical adjustments, so revisions are visible rather than silent.
• Granularity: Quarter-by-TLD-group totals - all TLDs, .com, .net, ccTLD, legacy gTLD, new gTLD - plus top-10 TLD rankings and estimated renewal percentages per group.

That footprint is the pitch: domain industry sizing usually arrives as press-release fragments quoting one quarter's headline. This puts a quarter century of the namespace into one consistent frame, with definitional continuity documented across methodology changes - the September 2023 expansion and the April 2022 Freenom exit are datable events inside the timeline, not unexplained cliffs. Against a Datadory catalog averaging 7.81 across 1,744 datasets, this record scores 7/10: authoritative and internally consistent, with the trade-off that grain stops at TLD-group level rather than registrar or registrant level.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the fields you need, pick the cadence, pick the landing zone - the same quarter-by-TLD-group rows arrive whichever way you take them. Because each observation carries its reporting period and group labels inline, a renewal-rate model is a group-by rather than a document-reading project. The sample comes first, so the field mix and the cadence are settled facts before any commitment.

• Investors and quant researchers track the .com base as a macro signal for internet-exposed equities and read gTLD growth against renewal rates to separate durable adoption from churn theater. The investors quants use cases page shows where the series slots into an infrastructure stack.
• Market researchers and consultants cite registry-grade counts instead of vendor marketing numbers when sizing the domain and hosting markets; see the market researchers use cases page.
• Competitive intelligence teams benchmark registry portfolios - who is adding names, whose renewals are softening - using the top-10 TLD rankings as a league table that predates most of the competitors on it. The competitive intel product teams use cases page covers the workflow.
• Data scientists join TLD-group panels onto domain-keyed tables to model how namespace composition shapes spam, phishing and SEO outcomes; the data scientists use cases page has the patterns.

Teams wiring the feed into product surfaces will find delivery-side detail in the developers builders use cases page.

• The interactive media services data hub collects every dataset in the industry, this one included.
• Tranco Top Sites Ranking supplies the demand side - which domains actually get used - while this dataset supplies the supply side of how many names exist; head-to-head context lives in the Tranco record itself.
• IANA Root Zone Database is the authoritative inventory of every TLD that can exist; this dataset says how many registrations each family carries.
• APNIC Labs Measurements Dashboards measure per-economy internet behavior, pairing naturally with the ccTLD lens here.
• M-Lab Open Internet Performance Data measures how well the network underneath those names performs.
• Glossary background: what TLD registration statistics count, and how a domain popularity ranking answers a different question than a registration count.

If any of these fields belong in a model you maintain, get a sample of this dataset - real rows first, commitment after.