Industry IQ: One booming business? Internet domain names

The Internet added 24 million new domain names in 2008, according to a fourth-quarter 2008 report by Internet infrastructure services company VeriSign Inc., Mountain View, Calif.

The year ended with a total base of 177 million domain name registrations across all of the top level domains, a 16 percent increase over 2007.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, more than 10.1 million new domain names were registered across all TLDs. The composition of the domain name industry and rank order in terms of base size remained consistent in the fourth quarter. The five largest in terms of base size were .com, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net, and .org.
The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 90.4 million, a 12 percent increase over 2007.
During the quarter, VeriSign processed a peak of nearly 50 billion domain name system queries per day.