The Internet added 11 million domain name registrations in the fourth quarter of 2009, reflecting a steady pace of Internet growth a quarter-century after the birth of .com.

Those findings and more are featured in the latest Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign, Inc.

The Domain Name Industry closed 2009 with a base of more than 192 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs), an increase of nearly 15 million domain name registrations since the close of 2008. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the base of domain name registrations grew by two percent over the third quarter of 2009 and eight percent over the fourth quarter of 2008, VeriSign's report indicates.

New registrations in the fourth quarter of 2009 came in at around 3.7 million domain name registrations per month to total approximately 11 million new domain name registrations across all of the TLDs in the last quarter of 2009. This reflects an eight percent increase in new registrations from the third quarter 2009.

The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 96.7 million domain names at the end of 2009. This represents a two percent increase over the third quarter and a seven percent increase over the same quarter in 2008. New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of approximately 2.4 million per month in the last quarter of 2009 for a total of 7.3 million new registrations in the quarter. The renewal rate for the fourth quarter of 2009 was 71 percent which represents a slight change from the third quarter of 2009 which was approximately 70.5 percent.

VeriSign's average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the fourth quarter was 52 billion per day with peaks as high as 61 billion per day -- roughly equal to the average and peak queries per day in third quarter 2009. DNS query load jumped 48 percent for the daily average and 31 percent increase for peak daily queries, as compared to fourth quarter 2008.