VeriSign likely to announce 100M .com milestone today
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
DomainTools claims milestone reached; VeriSign earnings call on tap for today.
At the end of October VeriSign was very, very close to hitting the 100 million .com domain name milestone.
Now, according to DomainTools, there are officially 100 million .com domain names registered, not including those going through the redemption process or pending delete.
Given that VeriSign has its earnings call today at 4:30 PM EST, I’m betting the company will announce this milestone today.
According to DomainTools, yesterday’s .com zone file had 99,837,548 domain names. This doesn’t include 2.1 million domain names in redemption or pending delete status. More importantly, the company says it doesn’t include so-called “dark domains” that are not pointed to nameservers and aren’t listed in the zone file.
Add the dark domains in (but exclude the expiring ones) and you get 100.2 million.
Update: VeriSign announced it earnings but didn’t mention the milestone.
Does that include the hundreds of thousands that it keeps the average Joe from registering, or no?
100M..Now that’s a number to celebrate….
I think that they’ll wait until there are 100M active domains in the zone. Pending delete and grace period domains might be a bit hard to explain in a press release.
@ John – you’re probably right. Although DomainTools says it’s 100M w/o pending and grace when you include the “dark” domains. But then again…how are you going to explain that?
If I were VeriSign I’d just say “we hit 100M”