Base of registered domain names continues to grow.

VeriSign released its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief today, reporting that the total base of domain names increased by 5.2 million last quarter to 215 million.

Registrations have grown by more than 16.9 million since the second quarter of 2010.

The total base of .com and .net domain names passed 110 million. There were 8.1 million new .com and .net registrations during the quarter. VeriSign manages the registry for both of these top level domain names.

VeriSign reports that the rankings of country code top level domain names in terms of registration base stayed about the same. .Eu dropped one spot to ninth and China now holds the number eight spot.

You can view the full report here (pdf).

Here comes your yearly fee increase.

VeriSign has announced its almost-annual price increases for .com and .net domain names.

The wholesale cost from VeriSign for .com domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 on January 15, 2012 and the registry fee for .net domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11.

The VeriSign fee doesn’t include ICANN’s 18 cent fee per year. So the wholesale cost of a .com domain name will be $8.03 and a .net will be $5.29.

VeriSign just renewed its contract with ICANN to run .net. It allows VeriSign to continue jacking up .net prices 10% a year. ICANN didn’t provide an explanation for this arbitrary increase.

VeriSign’s press release about the price increase mentions the increasing load of DNS queries the company handles.

Don’t blame VeriSign for raising prices. It’s just making a smart business decision. Blame ICANN.

Tool lets you monitor real time domain registration trends.

After writing about VeriSign’s new beta NXD data tool yesterday, I also learned that the company has upgraded its Domain Tag Cloud into a neat tool to monitor real time domain registration trends.

DomainView incorporates the same data from the tag cloud — keyword frequency in recently registered domain names — and brings it to multiple formats. It also adds domain suggestions so you can see available .com and .net domains that include the hot keywords.

The product comes in several formats including a web app, an API, and an embeddable widget you can place on web sites. There’s also an add-on for Firefox and Chrome that creates a constantly updating ticker on the bottom of your browser. The ticker shows popular keywords in recent registrations and indicates if particular keywords are trending up or down.

VeriSign plans to launch a DomainView iPhone/iPad app soon as well. [Update: the app is now available.]

Combined with DomainScore, savvy domainers can use this tool to find high quality unregistered domain names.

VeriSign has released VERISIGN® DomainScore™ to the public.

The beta tool allows anyone to enter an unregistered domain name and get an idea of how much traffic the domain gets.

DomainScore uses NXD data — basically visit requests to non existent domain names — to calculate a score ranging from 1-10. The higher the score the higher the traffic to the domain. The score is for the last full week, the last 30 days, and last 60 days.

Based on my experience with similar data for pending delete domains, I think you’ll find the data most relevant for domains that haven’t just expired. This reduces the amount of dead link traffic included in the total and gives a better impression of type-in traffic.

VeriSign already offers this data to registrars, some of which in turn offer it to customers. Dynadot offers the data but with a day turnaround time. Some customers have apparently run millions of domains through Dynadot’s system. However, a number of large registrars have held this data close to their chest for their own use.

The public tool provides data instantly on up to 100 domain names.

VeriSign might need to put a CAPTCHA on it

Web adds more domain names in Q1.

April started with approximately 209.8 million domain names registered according to VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf). That means the base of registered domain names grew by 4.5 million in the first quarter.

The company says there are a combined 108 million .com and .net domain names registered. I suspect we’ll see some huge PR as the base of .com domain names approaches 100 million.

VeriSign estimates there are 81.7 million country code domain names.

The .Com and .Net registration base is increasing at a faster clip than ccTLDs.

In terms of rankings, .uk moved up a spot to be the fourth largest TLD, surpassing .org. China’s .cn dropped from seventh to ninth as a continued result of higher registration prices and hefty registration restrictions.

Germany’s .de remains the biggest country code domain name.