When you type in a domain name, like www.giftcardadvodate.org, the internet’s domain name system does a translation from that name to the actual address (like 192.168.1.23) that identifies the machine the website can be found on. The ZONE files are the files that the top level of the domain name system uses to start the name to address translation; these files contain every domain name registered at any given time.

I’ve had access to these files since 1998 and have versions from various years between then and now sitting around. I thought it would be interesting as another view into the growth of gift cards to see how many domain names contain both the words “gift” and “card” at different times in the last decade ( top graph):

These are only .com domains. The graph includes some basic interpolation for the years I don’t have data for. If you are intested in the actual domain names registered in each year, here is the raw data: 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008. The graph on the right is the size of the gift card market according to an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.