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July 17th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
A good time to evaluate a new Top Level Domain is after the first years registrations come in. So on this date we are three months after the anniversary of the first landrush in .EU and the name space is looking strong. As of this morning there are 2,487,014 registrations. For a TLD to be one year old and have over 2 Million registrations means a lot. However, Eurid could do a lot more help the growth. The registry actually thinks it can advertise and put out awareness videos to help the growth. They are dead wrong. The only way to grow a TLD is for consumers to see that TLD behind advertising campaigns for major brands that matter.
Putting out a video telling people the TLD exists is lame. If you want to drive home the fact that it exists, then put that TLD on packaging, behind a famous brand on billboards, and have TV commercials end with “Find out more information at www.BRAND.eu
”. The registry will never achieve the level of advertising just one successful company in the EU space could achieve. The registry needs to approach large companies like BMW, Starbucks, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to get them to use those registrations. Those companies are squatting on their own names. They are not actively using them. Why does Google.eu not resolve? Why does Starbucks.eu not resolve? Why does Yahoo.eu not resolve? Why does BMW.eu not resolve? The one brand I recognize in the Eurid Video is Century21. Century21.EU is a great example, but when I look deeper I see their SEO is horrible. They frame a page on another domain “frame src=http://www.century21.be/eu_home.aspx”. Yikes.
Eurid should consider approaching these large European companies and get them to use their EU domains. Now that would really do something. Sometimes the best press you can put out is not your own, but that of people using your services.
Breakdown of EU domain names registered per country:
| Count | Count | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Austria | 61,180 | Aland Island | 109 |
| Belgium | 70,642 | Bulgaria | 3,377 |
| Cyprus | 90,391 | Czech Republic | 51,083 |
| Germany | 801,037 | Denmark | 39,297 |
| Estonia | 5,302 | Spain | 53,731 |
| Finland | 11,616 | France | 168,404 |
| United Kingdom | 346,734 | French Guiana | 10 |
| Gibraltar | 2,407 | Guadeloupe | 74 |
| Greece | 18,187 | Hungary | 19,504 |
| Ireland | 26,880 | Italy | 122,372 |
| Lithuania | 4,285 | Luxembourg | 14,896 |
| Latvia | 7,016 | Martinique | 45 |
| Malta | 17,576 | Netherlands | 331,902 |
| Poland | 82,619 | Portugal | 10,386 |
| Reunion | 168 | Romania | 10,580 |
| Sweden | 90,596 | Slovenia | 3,814 |
| Slovakia | 10,902 | ||
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Posted in EU Domains |
9 Comments »
July 17th, 2007 at 9:33 AM
The .eu is a disaster zone. From a survey of 1.77M
resolving .eu domains in June, only 1.436M
had websites. Of these only 286222 websites are actively developed. That’s 19.94% of .eu websites and 16.16% of domains. The percentage of parked and warehoused/aggregated domains is around 15.15% of the websites. Holding websites account for 22.64% of .eu websites. The European business community has lost confidence in the .eu extension and many small businesses in Europe had their .eu domain snapped up by speculators and cybersquatters. That destroyed a lot of .eu’s credibility because EURid failed to protect the integrity of the .eu ccTLD. In Europe, .eu is associated with the waste, bureaucracy and incompetence of the EU. The .com and ccTLDs still massively outnumber .eu registrations.
UPDATE BY JAY: Jim, I think you are the most vocal person on how bad .EU is. I could not disagree more with the state of EU. If only 15% of names are owned by professional collectors that is a smaller percentage then dotcom. A lot of companies own their name in EU but they are not actively using it. More companies need to use their domain names for this space to be hot. Give it 10 years and I would bet .EU will be the next most popular extension in the world.
July 17th, 2007 at 12:00 PM
The problem with .eu is that there is not enough natural web development Jay,
rather than Google.ccTLD
. The small companies and developers tend drive the domain uptake. The rules for a ccTLD tend to differ from those for a TLD or gTLD. The unique selling point for a ccTLD is that it is strongly identified with a particular country.
All TLDs need that vital spark. It isn’t the big companies that provide it. People tend to ignore the large companies with .com identities that are not strongly branded in ccTLDs – that’s why people still think of Google.com
The .com is a mature TLD that has been in existence for years. The .eu is a relatively new ccTLD. There is no such country as Europe. A lot of the speculation that happened with .eu applied the rules of mature market speculation to this new ccTLD. The subsequent valuation of these domains by some of their registrants were similarly unrealistic.
The 15.15% applies to websites rather than domains. The figure for this domains owned by aggregators/direct nav/collectors is higher because many of these domains have no websites and in some cases, no nameservers.
Most European companies use their ccTLD or .com as their primary brand. These companies would lose a lot of investment in marketing by switching the lesser known .eu version of their domain. The only main corporate use of .eu is by companies operating on a pan-European basis. And these companies tend to use the .eu as a lander or portal page, diverting users to the relevant ccTLD website.
The .eu ccTLD will take between five and ten years to come around. I’ve said this elsewhere. However the ccTLD is a very dysfunctional one at the moment. Something has to be done to restore confidence in .eu as a viable brand. Having the registry promote the extension with a dodgy video doesn’t work.
John McCormac
July 17th, 2007 at 1:20 PM
The .eu ccTLD, unlike the .com TLD, is tied as a brand to the concept of the European Union in general. The European Union in its totality is a mixed bag in the countries that make up the EU. Most of the EU member countries still struggle between their nationalistic identity and their EU identity. The connection between the EU and the .eu ccTLD are intertwined and the lack of acceptance of the .eu extension into the mainstream, even in Europe, is tied to the EU and its ability to grow as a conglomerate. It will be closer to the ten year mark before this ccTLD overcomes this brand connection. Big .com TLD companies certainly should resolve their .eu ccTLDs to either their main sites or to specific landing pages, but they won’t be able pull the .eu ccTLD out of being a secondary extension. It will take the small and medium sized companies building their brand and goodwill into the .eu extension for it to become a true powerhouse.
The .eu registry is doing an extremely poor job in differentiating itself and creating brand viability because they’ve allowed themselves to rise and fall with the EU concept as a whole rather then to just it’s economic power. The registry should identify the top 100 up and coming companies in the EU and start showing how those companies have gained success by using the “.eu” in building their web presence.
UPDATE BY JAY: I think the EU should release their zonefile. That would allow people to track growth and chart their marketshare. However they think that is an invasion of privacy and are opposed to it. Historically TLDs that release their zonefile have better adoption. The EU seems to be opposed to true market forces. They discourage buying multiple domains and building value in the TLD. I think this is a fundamental mistake of Dot EU.
July 18th, 2007 at 11:15 PM
“The EU seems to be opposed to true market forces. They discourage buying multiple domains and building value in the TLD. I think this is a fundamental mistake of Dot EU.”
That sounds exactly like NSI back in 1993:
NSI: “No, you can only have one domain per organization.”
Me: “Yes, but I’d like the plural of our other domain name.”
NSI: “Well, OK. But we’re really not supposed to do that.”
July 19th, 2007 at 5:58 AM
The .eu view from an accredited .eu registrar
it is much much more!
, which are brandable but not easy to remember. Decide yourself: What do you like more? http://www.carmarket.eu or http://www.car-millers-best-cars.eu ?
Hi all together.
With interest I have read the blog entry and the comments about the .eu domain names.
I am an accredited .eu registrar from the beginning, which was called Sunrise period!
Starting with my official accredition at the Eurid I recieved lots of requests for domain registrations under .eu. There is no doubt that there have been “trademark owners” applying for the best names with “generic trademarks”, but this things also happened with other tlds as we all know.
Let me come to some statistics, which I and partner registrars (I work together with around 10 accredited registrars) have seen in the first months of the .eu names.
In the early beginning (first sunrise phase) there have been mostly requests from companies with registered trademarks and public bodies; the requests from generic trademark holders, have only been around 15% of the total requests. Big and famous companies tried to secure their domain names as early as possible from the beginning and this trend also has been recognized for the second Sunrise registration phase (company names / family names).
After 4 weeks of the second sunrise phase, me and some partner registrars recognized that there has been the first time a lower interest then all the weeks before, especially not so many applications / requests from existing trademark holders.
Since the beginning of our accreditation the requests for the normal registration phase become more and more from day to day until the official launch.
As an officially accredited registrar we signed in the contract that we will send the domain registration attempts to the Eurid (official registry) exactly in the order, we have recieved them of our customers.
As we have been sure that the most interesting names will be given away in the early early beginning, we have decided to inform the customers to submit the best names first, and we make order limits trying to provide best possible chances for our (mostly long term) customers. And fortunately our customers understood this
You all know: Success with domain names is based on good and mostly generic names – not on third class names!
Nearly each person / company who was interested in getting good .eu names had the chance to get some of them, but they had to read the rules exactly and of course they had to work with MORE then only one registrar (provider) to increase chances.
After the final processment of general registration phase the demand for names was high again! People have seen that there are so many names registered now and decided to register their most important names, which have not be registered, before anybody else will do so.
Around 2 weeks later there was the greatest hype of new registration wishes here.
Then the new registration wishes calmed down and the first domain requests from the market began to come.
Companies from whole Europe which do want to have for example generic names and have missed them during general registration asked the actual owners to sell them their domain names. I know many deals from own customers, and many is not 30
I helped them to secure their names, to transfer them and to do an owner change. I know the prices and that most of the (our) deals are not listed in any domain trade platform like Sedo, Afternic, ….. Some of them has been cheap, some of them has been really expensive – but the companies seems to see the value of “their” domain names under .eu increasing.
Ok, I am not an expert in domain prices, but I am trying to be better informed since the .eu start and I have a better “feeling” now which domain prices are ok for the markets and the interest of new owners.
The problems of the .eu domains would be another fact: some things happened also that causes problems, possibly time for another comment!
Let me come to the actual situation here with .eu:
After the first year of registration lots of names dropped, because of different reasons: unpaid invoices, speculative registrations, ….
The .eu names, which are registered currently, are not only owned by speculators of course, or (I do not like to say this word) domaingrabbers. Big companies and private persons, small companies and public bodys – the spread of the eu allocation is really wide.
After the high number of drops, the quality of the registered eu domain names has increased extremely. I also recognize that people are willing to pay more for buying eu domain names.
The best market in my opinion for good eu domains are the following sorts of domains:
GENERIC domains, which are in English or German language, are mostly searched.
GENERIC domains, which are equal to company names or family names.
SHORT domains
At the moment I do only see a small market for fantasy words like ahububo.eu
I think when the .eu TLD becomes more popular and famous that also this names will have a future. Driving around through Europe often and watching the advertisments I DO see now also EU names in newspapers, I hear them in the radio, but at the moment I could nearly count them still.
The request for new registrations is increasing here again since 2 months, so I am looking forward to have an interesting time with .eu in the next years.
Hope that this comment has gained your interest and sorry for any mistakes I made….
Looking forward for your comments too….
Frank
UPDATE BY JAY: Frank thank you for your outlook on the .EU space. It is good to hear from the person that sells the domain and the person that is talking to the people that register them.
July 19th, 2007 at 8:08 AM
Hi Jay!
I do only own my company and family name, thats all
But I am promoting eu domain sales for customers, if they like me to do so.
I hope that this facts give you all another point of view for the .eu market
@all Feel free to ask questions….
July 19th, 2007 at 11:20 AM
Jay, EURid has a problem with releasing the zonefile because of the privacy legislation in the EU. At least that is the excuse. Though the legislation in any of the EU jurisdictions could be used to challenge its release. However just releasing the zonefile may not boost the uptake. The .eu as it stands, has a serious brand image problem, as you pointed out earlier.
I can see the logic of your reasoning about extensions where the zonefile is released doing better historically. However much of that growth in ccTLDs would be linked to the size of the market for the extension increasing due to awareness and use. Also the growth of internet connectivity in these markets has a more pronounced effect on the growth of these ccTLDs. The unique selling point of ccTLDs is often the strongly branded association with their country. If you compare the distribution of .eu domains over each of the countries of the EU with the relevant ccTLDs and com/net/org/biz/info shares, it is clear that the .eu still has a long way to go to being a player in these countries.
As for EURid discouraging the registration of multiple domains, it does not do that. It is supposed to prevent warehousing of significant numbers of domains by registrars. That is actually written into the legislation governing the .eu ccTLD.
EURid marketing has been consistently pathetic. The latest scheme is apparently a competition for .eu website owners in Belgium and the Czech Republic to have their website’s url on a poster in a Brussels train station. These guys just don’t think on a European level. But value in an extension is not really built by the registry.
A lot of the small businesses and developers that kickstart development in an extension were effectively frozen out of .eu by the extreme level of speculation in the landrush. Value in an extension is not built by putting some PPC advertising on a page and hoping for the best. It is built by people and businesses using the extension and developing websites.
Speculation and development are linked and if there isn’t a balance, then the extension suffers. The .eu has joined .info and .biz as a third choice extension while the main EU extensions are the ccTLDs and .com TLD. It would take some drastic actions to increase confidence in .eu ccTLD and some very effective marketing to change that situtation. It should be interesting to see the drop figures for .eu’s second landrush anniversary.