VeriSign, Inc. VRSN just issued the 2013 fourth quarter Domain Name Industry Brief reporting that five million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2013, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 271 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Dec. 31, 2013.

The increase of five million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.9% over the third quarter of 2013.

Worldwide registrations have grown by 18.5 million, or 7.3%, year over year.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter of 2013, reaching a combined total of approximately 127.2 million domain names in the adjusted zone for .com and .net. representing a 5% increase year over year.

New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.2 million during the fourth quarter of 2013 compared to 8.0 million in 2012

As of Dec. 31, 2013, the base of registered names in .com equaled 112 million names, while .net equaled 15.2 million names.

New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.2 million during the fourth quarter of 2013. In the fourth quarter of 2012, new .com and .net registrations totaled 8.0 million.

During the fourth quarter of 2013, Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 82 billion across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 100 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average increased 0.9 percent and the peak decreased 5.5 percent.

Year over year, the daily average increased 6.4 percent and the peak decreased 19.2%.

Of course none of these number reflect the new gTLD which did not launch until 2014 which has around 450,000 registrations.

Verisign reports that  47.7% of four-character domain names, over 95.3% of five-character domain names and more than 99.8% of six-character domain names are still available as of Dec. 31, 2013