401,600,000 Domain name registrations on the internet at the end of Q2 2026. I wonder how long it’ll take to reach a billion—and I think we will, eventually—considering this number is only ~30 million more than last year’s. About 167 million of these are .com (still over 40% of all domains!)
$135,000,000 The winning bid for .web on July 27, 2016 by Verisign. NU DOT CO LLC, secretly bidding on behalf of Verisign, won .web in an ICANN auction for $135 million in 2016 (part of the 2012 gTLD round). It’s the most any registry has paid for a gTLD in auction (that we know of)
$70,000,000
The sale price of ai.com.
The crypto.com founder paid $70 million for ai.com, more than double the previous (known) high watermark of $30 million for voice.com. He paid fully in crypto, of course, even bought a Superbowl ad and all. $227,000 ICANN’s base application fee for the 2026 gTLD round. Right now, until August 12, anyone can apply to create a new top-level domain. Corporates can apply to own their .brand, cities can apply to run their .geo, and registries can apply to sell .whatever to the general public
8.8.8.8 The IP address of Google’s public DNS resolver. As review: when you plunk a domain name into your browser’s address bar, it goes to find the IP address behind the domain. A DNS resolver is the program that does this, like an internet phone book
$6,006.13
How much Google paid for google.com when they forgot to renew it.
In 2015, Google accidentally let google.com expire, and an ex-Googler purchased it right there on Google Domains (RIP) for just $12 at 1:20am. Google paid him $6,006.13 because the number “spelled-out Google, numerically” $4,000 ICANN’s annual accreditation fee for registrars. GoDaddy, Porkbun, Squarespace, Cloudflare, et al. pay $4,000 per year to ICANN. That doesn’t seem like much, and how many registrars could there even be, right? 3,023. There are 3,023 accredited registrars
1985
The year the first domain, symbolics.com, was registered.
On March 15, 1985 a computer company named Symbolics registered symbolics.com. It is the first and longest tenured domain, although it changed hands in 2009 1,595 Top-level domains delegated to the root zone. As of today, there are 1,595 top-level domains in the DNS root. Of those, 316 are ccTLDs and 1,250 are gTLDs (g for generic). The generics break down into brand TLDs, like .google; geoTLDs, like .nyc; and general ones, like .press (oh, hey)
920 The RFC that established the initial set of top-level domains. In 1984 Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds wrote RFC 920, “Domain Requirements,” defining the first TLDs: .com , .org, .gov, .edu, and .mil
277 The number of top-level domains owned by Identity Digital. Identity Digital, formerly Donuts, raised $100 million to apply for hundreds of top-level domains in 2012. In the years since, they’ve bought up other registries to grow their portfolio, which includes the TLDs .email, .lgbt, and .wtf
63 The maximum length of a domain label. To illustrate that 63 characters is Quite Long Enough, consider for example the 60-character title of one of my favorite essays, recast as a domain name: getting-away-from-pretty-much-already-being-away-from-it-all.com
47% The percentage of Anguilla’s revenue from .ai domain sales in 2025. Anguilla is using .ai proceeds to fund infrastructure, like schools, roads, and airports. Hypothetically, Anguilla could even fund a Universal Basic Income of ~$2-5k per citizen (kind of like Alaska’s oil-funded dividend)
13 The number of DNS root servers. There’s a set of root servers around the world whose primary job is to store domain-IP pairs. There are only 13 such servers. Technically, it’s 13 IP addresses shared by about two thousand actual servers around the world. 12 organizations run those 13 root servers
$10.26 The wholesale price Verisign charges for .com domains. On November 1, this will go up to $10.97. Verisign has a contract with ICANN and the US Department of Commerce (the NTIA, technically) that allows them to raise .com prices by up to 7% for the last four years of the six-year contract
10 The maximum number of years for which you can register a domain. Owning your own domain is about the closest you can get to ownership on the internet (much more control than a social media account, say)
2 The number of characters in a ccTLD. Any top-level domain you come across with two letters belongs to a country. So for example .ai, .io, and .co belong to Anguilla, the British Indian Ocean Territory, and Colombia, respectively. Those are called country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs
$0.20 ICANN’s transaction fee paid by registrars when a domain is registered, renewed, or transferred. Only a couple dimes, sure, but if you take this number and multiply it by that other number—400 million domains registered—you get $80 million in transaction fees ICANN collects each year
$0 The initial cost to register a domain in 1993. Domain registration was free when it first opened to the public in the early nineties. The internet will probably be pretty niche, anyway, right?
Domains by the numbers
dotcom.press/archive/domains-by-the-numbers
although probably nicer to read on the website^, this is well suited to a thread, so here goes 
Your first app and your biggest app shouldn't need different platforms. Matt and KP talk about building tools that support beginners, professionals, and production workloads alike.
The drag-and-drop part took three months in 2013. Most of the thirteen years since went into the paragraph above.
www.netlify.com/blog/thirtee...