The .eu domain extension was one of the bright spots when I analyzed how different extensions had fared in aftermarket sales volume during the first six months of 2023. The .eu extension sales dollar volume was up significantly compared to the same period during the preceding year, or recent years.
I decided to take a longer term look at the extension, with a focus on what types of names sell, how they are put to use, and other questions of interest to those considering .eu domain name investments.
A Short History
While .eu has the two-letter form of a country code extension, and is viewed as a country code, it is a bit different, as it represents a region, the European Union, rather than a single country.
The extension was launched in December 2005, and is available
At time of writing, the European Union has a total population of about 450 million across 27 member states.
The registry for the extension is EURid.
Registrations
Registration numbers vary somewhat across different sources, but DomainNameStat indicate about 5.2 million .eu registrations, placing it 13th among country codes.
To put that in perspective, all data from the same source (DomainNameStat), .de had 24.6 million, .nl 7.5 million, .fr 6.2 million, .co 5.0 million, .us 4.2 million, .in 4.0 million, .pl 3.7 million, .ch 3.0 million, .me 2.0 million, .cc 1.5 million, .id 1.1 million, and .tv 0.7 million.
Annual Sales Volume
I used NameBio to find the annual aftermarket sales dollar volume for .eu. Keep in mind that only a minority of retail sales get reported in NameBio. I extrapolated the 2023 number, assuming sales volume rate stays constant in the extensions for the rest of 2023.
While the volume has been slowly increasing since 2019, and this year is on track to be the best in many years, nevertheless the extension has not reached the success it saw in the early years.
Top 10 Sales Over Last 5 Years
The table below shows the ten highest value .eu sales over the last 5 years, at least of those reported in NameBio. Only one sale has topped $100,000 during the last five years.
If we consider .eu sales over all time, hotels.eu sold for $329,509 and shopping.eu for $196,803, both in 2006.
The Top 100 Sales by Type
I looked in more detail at the top 100 NameBio-reported .eu sales from the last 5 years. Shown below is how they broke down by type.
While 16% were very short 2L or 3L names, more, 45% were one-word names and 24% contained two words. I designated brandable names that did not have a recognizable word, or were a creative spelling.
Only one sale included a hyphen. There were no numeric names in the top 100 list, and only one alphanumeric.
Languages
I also broke down the single and multiple word domain names by language. For terms that were not obviously English, I entered into Google Translate with Detect Language, and looked at the language it suggested. That may not always be the best, and certainly not the only choice.
For the word names, I found that 57 were English, 4 German, 2 French, and a single entry in a number of languages including Russian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Albanian, Latin, Kurdish, and Uzbek.
This was for the language of the word(s) in the name. When I looked at developed sites, see below, the fraction that were English sites was much lower.
Length
The top 100 .eu sales from the past five years tended to be short, with an average length of 6.5, range from 2 to 15. The distribution is shown below.
Sales Venue
For the top 100 reported sales from the last 5 years, 99 sold at Sedo. Keep in mind that sales from a number of venues, including Afternic and Dan, are not reported in NameBio.
Current Status
For each of the 100 top sales from last 5 years, I tried to visit the associated website. The chart below indicates what I found. 45% of the sites were developed, with another 5% used for redirection to a developed site on a different domain name, and 6% had some sort of coming soon splash page.
There were 37% of the top 100 sales that did not have an operational website. Only 7% were listed for sale again.
Sectors and Niches
For each of the developed and redirected sites, I visited the site and used a word or short phrase to characterize the type of business. There was no obvious concentration. I created the following word cloud to display the results.
Although it did not emerge in the word cloud, many of the sites had a sustainability or environmental focus.
There were no adult sites in the developed top 100.
Many of the sites were a language other than English, with German, Dutch and Spanish most popular. Note that there is a dichotomy in that the vast majority of major sales are English words, but when one looks at actual sites there is much more diversity in language.
Website Use
When I last updated my look at actual use by extension, the Cisco Umbrella data placed .eu just inside the top 25 of all extensions. It had risen from a similar analysis two years earlier.
Alexa 1M data is no longer updated, but when I looked in 2021, .eu placed slightly higher by that measure, with 1165 Alexa 1M sites, just below .xyz, .me, .tv and .edu, and just above .biz, .app, .club and .us.
If we use the simplistic measure of results using a
Low Levels of Abuse
The day I checked, Spamhaus indicated only 1% of observed active .eu domains had spam or other abuse, resulting in a badness score of 0.06 (lower is better).
By comparison, .net is 1.8% with score of 0.15, .com is 1.6% with 0.17 score, .co is 1.5% with 0.12 score, .us is 4.2% with a 0.34 score, and .io is 0.5% with a .02 score.
Cost
You can use TLD-list to find the most competitive rates for registrations. The day I checked, Porkbun, Dynadot, and NameSilo had the best rates, with first year standard registrations at about $2.50 or less, and the same three registrars had renewals just under $6.00 per year.
If seeking unregistered single word domains in the extension, One Word Domains does include .eu.
Please share your opinions and experiences with .eu domains in the comment section below.
Thank you to @TopBrandsForSale who suggested an analysis of .eu sales as a NamePros Blog topic. The word image was generated using software from Free Word Cloud Generator. Particular thanks for NameBio for the data analyzed for this article.
I decided to take a longer term look at the extension, with a focus on what types of names sell, how they are put to use, and other questions of interest to those considering .eu domain name investments.
A Short History
While .eu has the two-letter form of a country code extension, and is viewed as a country code, it is a bit different, as it represents a region, the European Union, rather than a single country.
The extension was launched in December 2005, and is available
While nothing restricts use for companies or organizations operating only within a single EU country, in practice, the extension seems particularly adopted for businesses or organizations that have clients or customers in multiple EU countries.
At time of writing, the European Union has a total population of about 450 million across 27 member states.
The registry for the extension is EURid.
Registrations
Registration numbers vary somewhat across different sources, but DomainNameStat indicate about 5.2 million .eu registrations, placing it 13th among country codes.
To put that in perspective, all data from the same source (DomainNameStat), .de had 24.6 million, .nl 7.5 million, .fr 6.2 million, .co 5.0 million, .us 4.2 million, .in 4.0 million, .pl 3.7 million, .ch 3.0 million, .me 2.0 million, .cc 1.5 million, .id 1.1 million, and .tv 0.7 million.
Annual Sales Volume
I used NameBio to find the annual aftermarket sales dollar volume for .eu. Keep in mind that only a minority of retail sales get reported in NameBio. I extrapolated the 2023 number, assuming sales volume rate stays constant in the extensions for the rest of 2023.
While the volume has been slowly increasing since 2019, and this year is on track to be the best in many years, nevertheless the extension has not reached the success it saw in the early years.
Top 10 Sales Over Last 5 Years
The table below shows the ten highest value .eu sales over the last 5 years, at least of those reported in NameBio. Only one sale has topped $100,000 during the last five years.
| Name | Year | Price (USD) |
| topfx.eu | 2023 | 106,209 |
| forum.eu | 2018 | 42,500 |
| hero.eu | 2019 | 32,500 |
| scp.eu | 2022 | 27,507 |
| technology.eu | 2020 | 17,714 |
| themarket.eu | 2020 | 15,982 |
| lumen.eu | 2020 | 15,388 |
| stem.eu | 2022 | 12,792 |
| service.eu | 2023 | 12,775 |
| gamers.eu | 2019 | 12,459 |
If we consider .eu sales over all time, hotels.eu sold for $329,509 and shopping.eu for $196,803, both in 2006.
The Top 100 Sales by Type
I looked in more detail at the top 100 NameBio-reported .eu sales from the last 5 years. Shown below is how they broke down by type.
While 16% were very short 2L or 3L names, more, 45% were one-word names and 24% contained two words. I designated brandable names that did not have a recognizable word, or were a creative spelling.
Only one sale included a hyphen. There were no numeric names in the top 100 list, and only one alphanumeric.
Languages
I also broke down the single and multiple word domain names by language. For terms that were not obviously English, I entered into Google Translate with Detect Language, and looked at the language it suggested. That may not always be the best, and certainly not the only choice.
For the word names, I found that 57 were English, 4 German, 2 French, and a single entry in a number of languages including Russian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Albanian, Latin, Kurdish, and Uzbek.
This was for the language of the word(s) in the name. When I looked at developed sites, see below, the fraction that were English sites was much lower.
Length
The top 100 .eu sales from the past five years tended to be short, with an average length of 6.5, range from 2 to 15. The distribution is shown below.
Sales Venue
For the top 100 reported sales from the last 5 years, 99 sold at Sedo. Keep in mind that sales from a number of venues, including Afternic and Dan, are not reported in NameBio.
Current Status
For each of the 100 top sales from last 5 years, I tried to visit the associated website. The chart below indicates what I found. 45% of the sites were developed, with another 5% used for redirection to a developed site on a different domain name, and 6% had some sort of coming soon splash page.
There were 37% of the top 100 sales that did not have an operational website. Only 7% were listed for sale again.
Sectors and Niches
For each of the developed and redirected sites, I visited the site and used a word or short phrase to characterize the type of business. There was no obvious concentration. I created the following word cloud to display the results.
Although it did not emerge in the word cloud, many of the sites had a sustainability or environmental focus.
There were no adult sites in the developed top 100.
Many of the sites were a language other than English, with German, Dutch and Spanish most popular. Note that there is a dichotomy in that the vast majority of major sales are English words, but when one looks at actual sites there is much more diversity in language.
Website Use
When I last updated my look at actual use by extension, the Cisco Umbrella data placed .eu just inside the top 25 of all extensions. It had risen from a similar analysis two years earlier.
Alexa 1M data is no longer updated, but when I looked in 2021, .eu placed slightly higher by that measure, with 1165 Alexa 1M sites, just below .xyz, .me, .tv and .edu, and just above .biz, .app, .club and .us.
If we use the simplistic measure of results using a
site:TLD search, the .eu extension does well with 359 million results. That would place it below .co, .me and .tv, similar to .cc and .io, and much higher than .ai, .gg or .vc.Low Levels of Abuse
The day I checked, Spamhaus indicated only 1% of observed active .eu domains had spam or other abuse, resulting in a badness score of 0.06 (lower is better).
By comparison, .net is 1.8% with score of 0.15, .com is 1.6% with 0.17 score, .co is 1.5% with 0.12 score, .us is 4.2% with a 0.34 score, and .io is 0.5% with a .02 score.
Cost
You can use TLD-list to find the most competitive rates for registrations. The day I checked, Porkbun, Dynadot, and NameSilo had the best rates, with first year standard registrations at about $2.50 or less, and the same three registrars had renewals just under $6.00 per year.
If seeking unregistered single word domains in the extension, One Word Domains does include .eu.
Please share your opinions and experiences with .eu domains in the comment section below.
Thank you to @TopBrandsForSale who suggested an analysis of .eu sales as a NamePros Blog topic. The word image was generated using software from Free Word Cloud Generator. Particular thanks for NameBio for the data analyzed for this article.
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