Marion would like to wish a very “Happy Birthday” to .com who turns 25 on March 15^th. That’s right, it’s been 25 years since the conception of .com.

 VeriSign, the global registry operator for .com and .net, released an industry brief discussing the performance of .com and other Top Level Domain Names (TDLs).

 In the past 25 years the Internet has transformed lives around the globe. It has radically altered our world-view by providing access to people, places, information and things that at one time were unattainable and unknowable. It has made us all virtual explorers not only on our own journey but also, collectively, as part of others’. It has narrowed the definition of neighbor to mean not simply someone who lives next door but rather a person in London, Moscow, or Beijing with whom one shares a common experience, shared interest, or personal struggle. In doing all these things, the Internet has opened our minds to a world of endless possibilities, created new found opportunity, and inspired action like nothing else before it.

 In our of .com’s birthday, we thought that we would post some fun and interesting facts about .com and other TDLs:

•  The first .com was assigned to symbolics.com on March 15, 1985
• At first, .cor was proposed as the domain name for corporation, but when the final version came out, it switched to .com
• 2 ½ years after the first registration, only 100 total .com domain name registrations existed
• By 1992, there were still less that 15,000 .com domain names registered
• 88% of .com and .net domain names resolve to a website, meaning that an end-user visiting that domain name would find a website
• At the close of 2009, there were more than 192 million domain name registrations, an increase of nearly 15 million since the close of 2008
• While .com continues to have the highest number of total registrations, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net and .uk (United Kingdom) follow
• While .com actually ended the fourth quarter of 2009 with a 1% decline, previously it had seen growth as high as 467% year over year
• The fourth quarter of 2009, VeriSign saw 52 million Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day, with peaks as high as 61 million per day
• Marion received their domain June 16, 1995; Google.com received their domain name in 1997; Linkedin.com received their domain name in 2002; Flickr.com received their domain name in 2003; Youtube.com received their domain name in 2005

 When interviewed, Jack Haverty, one of the Internet pioneers at MIT, speaks about his amazement about the creation of the Internet:

 “I don’t recall anybody ever thinking we were creating an organizational structure to encompass hundreds of millions of entities covering the entire planet in support of all human activities. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to last for 30+ years, even as an experiment. It just happened to turn out that way.”

 For your own .com and custom web design, contact The Marion Group at 713.623.6444 or email us at info2@marion.com.

 See the entire VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief.