The Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.

It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.

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The .com top-level domain has dominated the Internet pretty much from the start, and that’s still the case. But how strong is this dominance? After all, there are now approximately 200 million registered domain names, and less than half of those are .coms.

To find out what the current situation looks like for actual, popular websites, we’ve looked at this from two different perspectives:

• The top 10,000 websites in the world.
• The top 10,000 websites in the United States.

This article will show you the distribution of top-level domains (TLDs) among these top websites to show you how widely used .com is today, and how the other top-level domains are doing by comparison.

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We stumbled upon an interesting statistic the other day: According to DomainTools there are more than 380 million deleted gTLD domain names, i.e. domain names that at some point have been registered but no longer exist. More than 80% of those are .com domain names.

This number needs to be put into perspective to understand how unnaturally large it is. The total number of active gTLD domain names (.com, .net, .org, etc.) today is about 118 million. We find it hard to believe that on top of these, there would have at some time existed another 380 million legitimate domain names.

So how did that number become so large? The answer is quite simple: domain tasting.

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With the Internet growing rapidly over the years, the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has increased from just a handful to about twenty, with many more proposed or in planning. Some, such as .com and .edu, have seen widespread adoption and are a useful contribution to the Internet. Others haven’t been quite as lucky. You could say they have flopped.

From domain extensions that never made it past the planning table, to those that make little sense at all, there are probably more flops than successes. Here are five of the worst TLD flops in Internet history (in no specific order).

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Verisign publishes a quarterly report about the domain name industry called The Domain Name Industry Brief. The latest report, summing up Q1 2009, was just released.

Since there is always a lot of data in these reports to mull through, we decided to pick out what we think are some of the more interesting facts and figures and sum them up in this article.

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There are now 177 million domain names across all top-level domains, which is an increase by 16% (24 million domain names) compared to a year ago.

These numbers are from the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, a quarterly report from Verisign about the growth of the domain name industry. Verisign has been doing this report a few years now, so we went back and looked at the data for 2006 and 2007 as well so we could show a wider time frame than just 2008 (to see trends, etc).

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