VeriSign released their quarterly report on domain registrations know as the “The Domain Industry Brief” today.

Here are some of the key findings, all are based on the quarter ending September 30, 2008.

There were 174 million domains registered across all Top Level Domains (TLD’s) representing 3% growth over second quarter and 19% over the same quarter from 2007.

The total of Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD’s) was 68.9 million a five percent from the previous quarter and an increase of 26% from the same quarter last year.

The highest extensions ranked by the number of registrations were:

.com

.cn (china)

.de (Germnay)

.net

.org

.uk (United Kingdom)

.info

.nl (Netherlands)

.eu

.biz

Although the number of total registration grew, the number of new domain registrations declined.

New registrations were down 2% from both the second quarter of 2008 and the from the third quarter, 2007.

The ccTLD’s which are growing the fastest for the third quarter are:

.ru (Russian Federation)

.pl (Poland)

.eu (European Union)

.Kr (South Korean)

.Es (Spain)

.com’s and .net’s had 80.4 million registrations at the end of the quarter.

New registrations of .com and .net’s for the quarter was 6.9 million domains, representing a 2% increase from the previous quarter but an 8% decrease over the third quarter last year.

VeriSign estimated that 8% of all domains are used for PPC pages.

Renewal rates for .com’s and .net’s dropped to 72% from 74% last year, same quarter and is down from its peak of 77% renewal rate hit in the 4th quarter of 2006.

The report cited reduced Google’s Adsense payouts, as a major reason for the drop in new registrations and renewals, but as usual, VeriSign does not mention their back to back annual price increases, as a possible contributing factor in the decline of new registrations or renewals.

VeriSign continues to believe that they can continue to increase their prices in a bad economy without effecting the number of people who use their service.

You can read the full report here. (pdf)