Looks like we’re headed for a big milestone on the Internet: 200 million registered domain names. By the end of Q1 this year there were a total of 193 million domain names when counting all top-level domains. That was two months ago.

When we say all top-level domains, we mean both gTLDs and ccTLDs. gTLDs are those generic top-level domains like .com, .net and .org. ccTLDs are country code top-level domains such as .de, .cn and .uk.

We may already have passed 200 million domain names, actually. Two months ago, there were less than 117 million gTLDs. Now there are almost 121 million. That’s an increase of more than 4 million domain names, and that without including the more than 240 ccTLDs that exist out there. So, if you count all top-level domains together, 200 million either is very, very close, or a number we’ve recently passed.

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The domain name market is often likened to the real estate market, and a significant share of all domain names out there have been bought by people hoping to later sell them on for a greater price than what they paid for them.

The question is, how many of today’s domain names are actually held by domain name speculators?

Verisign is the registry handling the .com and .net top level domains, and they recently released statistics that can help us shed some light on this question.

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