VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), a global leader in domain names and internet security has announced that approximately 15 million domain names were added to the internet in the fourth quarter of 2015, bringing the total number of registered domain names to approximately 314 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of the end of last year.

VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), a global leader in domain names and internet security has announced that approximately 15 million domain names were added to the internet in the fourth quarter of 2015, bringing the total number of registered domain names to approximately 314 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of the end of last year.

The increase of approximately 15 million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 5 per cent over the third quarter of 2015. Worldwide registrations have grown by 25.9 million, or 9 per cent, year over year.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter of 2015, reaching a combined total of approximately 139.8 million .com and .net domain names in the domain name base. This represents a 6.3 per cent increase year over year. As of December 31, 2015, the domain name base of .com equaled 124 million names, while .net equaled 15.8 million names.

In the fourth quarter, Verisign processed 12.2 million new domain name registrations for .com and .net, as compared to 8.2 million domain names for the same period in 2014.

During the fourth quarter of 2015, Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was approximately 123 billion queries per day across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of nearly 194 billion. Quarter over quarter, the daily average query load increased 2.8 per cent and the peak decreased by 67.3 per cent. Year over year, the daily average query load increased by 11.9 per cent, and the peak increased by 32.6 per cent.