A recent industry briefing released by VeriSign Inc, a provider of Internet infrastructure services, has shed light on the steadily growing dot com industry in India. According to its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB), India has registered a total of 1.037 million .com and .net domain names.
Notable statistics revealed in the report are that globally new .com and .net registrations were added at an average of 2.7 million per month in the first quarter of 2010 for a total of 8.1 million new registrations in the quarter. This is an increase of 11 million domain name registrations as compared to the first quarter of 2009 or a 0.6% of relative growth.
The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 99.3 million domain names in the first quarter of 2010. In all the first quarter of 2010 saw over 193 million domain name registrations across all the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) such as .org, .cn etc.
The astounding growth of the number of internet users across the world is reflected in the fact that direct visits to .com and .net domains (query load) according to VeriSign during the quarter 2010 were 54 billion per day with peaks as high as 63.2 billion per day. Taken annually, the daily average increased 41 per cent and the peak daily queries grew 43 per cent.
The briefing also highlighted another report released by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank on the 25th anniversary of the first .com domain name registration. The most important findings of this report are the value of economic benefits the commercial internet has generated across the world.
1985’s most lasting contribution- 3 letters and a punctuation mark has come a long way from its humble beginnings. It is estimated that .coms have generated $400 million in economic benefits to businesses and consumers globally. This figure is expected to double over the next 10 years. The same figure stands at $1.5 trillion for the entire commercial internet. This amount is larger than the global sales of medicines and investment in R&D and renewable energy. The dot com economy has significant impact on the economies of countries. Like in the US they account for 2 percent of employment with wages equaling 2 percent of U.S. GDP. It is estimated that even if the growth of e commerce occurs at half the present growth rate, it will contribute $3.8 trillion to the global economy. The most astounding fact is that 99.9% of this growth has occurred over the last 15 years.(ITIF Report)
And growth is assuredly going to happen looking at the patterns of internet usage from a commercial perspective. In Europe, the percentage of online shoppers grew by 85% between 2004 and 2009. Experience with online shopping in developing countries is rapidly catching up with that seen in more developed regions. 63% of Internet users in Latin American and 70% of users in Asia Pacific countries have made at least one purchase online compared to 85% of Internet users in North America and Europe. The country with the highest percentage of adult citizens who shopped online was Japan, with 52% in 2009. The potential for growth is immense because only about 25 percent of the world’s 6.7 billion people participate in the dot-com economy.
These numbers are of course in the face of all the naysayers who labeled the internet as a passing fad. Even though the dot com industry faced a slow growth initially and faced several road blocks, it has come a long way and is definitely here to stay.
