The silent evolution of domain names

Verisign recently  reported that the number of registered dot-com domain names exceeded 128 million for the first time. With a wholesale price of $7.85 each, this means $1,004,800,000 in annual fees, and that’s before factoring in reseller prices, country code domains and alternative extensions to measure the domain-name industry as a whole.
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It’s not uncommon to spend well over $100,000 for a premium domain name. However, buying an extension is a whole other league — a league in which brands have only been too happy to play.
For example, the rights to .BLOG were purchased by WordPress for $19 million, Google paid $25 million for .APP, Amazon paid up to $10 million for .BOOK and Verisign backed a $135 million winning bid for .WEB — and most of these companies have acquired the rights to more than one new extension.
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For Q1 2016, Verisign reported some staggering statistics, including the total number of domain names across all top-level domains has grown to 326.4 million.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/the-silent-evolution-of-domain-names/
https://blog.verisign.com/domain-names/internet-grows-to-326-4-million-domain-names-in-the-first-quarter-of-2016/