In the third quarter of 2011, nearly five million domain names were added to the Internet bringing the total number of registered domains to nearly 220 million worldwide across all domains.

VeriSign (News - Alert) Inc. said 4.9 million new domain names were added in the third quarter, marking the third straight quarter with growth of more than 2 percent.

VeriSign, Inc. (News - Alert) helps to keep the power and potential of the Internet available. Companies and consumers all over the world depend on our services and infrastructure billion of times every day. VeriSign said, “They strive to enable the full potential of the Internet through its management of the indispensable infrastructure for .com and .net.”

The .com and .net Top Level Domains (TDLs) experienced aggregate growth in the third quarter, reaching a combined total of 112 million names. New .com and .net registrations totaled 7.9 million during the quarter. This is a 5.9 percent increase year-over-year in new registrations.

TDL is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. The management of most of the top-level domains is currently delegated to responsible organizations by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

ICANN was created in 1998 and was designed to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the United States government by other organizations, notable the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which ICANN now operates.

The latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief focuses on some of the new categories that are likely to emerge out of the ICANN plan to introduce new generic TLDs (gTLDs).

Domain’s range in price with the TDLs usually costing the most on a yearly basis versus the generic domains which come at a much more affordable fee. Either way, the results of this research further prove what most people already know, the Internet is growing on a large scale. If you have an idea for a domain you better claim it now before someone else gets to it.