Our Estimate: Verisign Manages Over 100 Million .COM Domains

A number of organizations track the .com domain registrations without taking into consideration the complete picture, thus underestimating the current count. Our research shows that the .com count is already well past that number. Verisign publishes a daily “zone file” of registered .com domain names with their associated nameservers. Yesterday the zone file listed 99,837548 .com domain names and that number has been growing by an average of about 22,000 net new .com domain names per day so far in 2012. But there are two general categories of domain names that exist but are not listed in the zone files.