.eu domains

[colombani]

I began to invest in .eu domains six month ago.
I have purchased a lot of .eu domains in the last pool .eu auction.

other .eu investor or developer here ?

Any tought about .eu future ?

 

[Damion]

Perhaps publically executing the lot of them would restore some confidence but the business element that forms the backbone of any TLD is missing from .eu ccTLD.

I hope you don't mean that literately about executing jmcc?
I'm sure you didn't but you may want to edit that out to avoid being misunderstood.

These people have children and family and are human beings that don't deserve to lose their lives for an extension.

Unfortunately no laws or agreements where broken as far as i know but it occurs more and more that this doesn't stop things happening that are plain wrong, in fact some laws and agreements only facilitates it.

 

[jmcc]

I hope you don't mean that literately about executing jmcc?
I'm sure you didn't but you may want to edit that out to avoid being misunderstood.

It was sarcasm born out of sheer frustration of seeing an incompetently designed framework being so badly abused. Though the problem goes beyond EURid to the European Commission and the fools that advised them to set up this utterly stupid system.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Damion]

I understand your frustration and is clearly visible although sarcasm isn't clearly visible in your post unfortunately.
Thanks for clarifying though.

 

[smartpc]

jmcc I am irish too. The point still stands though .eu is a good investment for europeans. The marketing regionalization of the .eu extension can`t be overlooked.

By the sounds of it jmcc you lost out on the names you went after, me too I only registered 3% of my pre-registrations, but some of the names I picked up in the days after of continous searching are humm dingers and are going to make great brandable web business`s targetted at european consumers and hell some of them are worth a pretty penny but there worth 1000 times more developed.

The extension needs time to grow its only year 1 and some .eu`s are proving to be very valauable hoteles.eu €257,000 , shopping.eu €157,000 at moniker auction 3 months past.

Even with 11 million .de registered I still picked up 2 good registrations this week alone.

The .eu extension will be high ranking over the medium too long term.

 

[jmcc]

jmcc I am irish too. The point still stands though .eu is a good investment for europeans. The marketing regionalization of the .eu extension can`t be overlooked.

It will be a long term investment that may not come around for at least three years.

By the sounds of it jmcc you lost out on the names you went after, me too I only registered 3% of my pre-registrations, but some of the names I picked up in the days after of continous searching are humm dingers and are going to make great brandable web business`s targetted at european consumers and hell some of them are worth a pretty penny but there worth 1000 times more developed.

My job is basically analysing domain registration trends and movements in the gTLDs and some European ccTLDs. And part of that was mapping the .eu ccTLD. That overview of a large percentage of registered .eu domains and the patterns of squatting (as opposed to legitimate and necessary domaining) is what makes me so cynical about it. The amount of pure keyword and trademark cybersquatting is what distinguishes .eu from other TLDs.

The extension needs time to grow its only year 1 and some .eu`s are proving to be very valauable hoteles.eu €257,000 , shopping.eu €157,000 at moniker auction 3 months past.

I think that a lot of the high priced sales may turn out to be shell games designed to talk up .eu so that the squatters can sell the other, less attractive domains they are holding.

The .eu extension will be high ranking over the medium too long term.

Somehow I'm not so sure. Try looking up www.google.eu and see what Google really thinks of .eu ccTLD. The problem for search engines with a pan-national extension like .eu is that the geo-ip methodology is more problematic now. There are simple solutions but I don't think that Google/Yahoo/Microsoft really understands how to geo-locate websites in a non-ccTLD extension.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Gerrit]

I agree with you about the bad start of .EU, but that doesn't destroy the whole potential of the extention. Especially with Europe becoming more and more unified, maybe not yet in the minds of the people (though depends on your political believes I guess) but definitely politically. And the enlarging EU with new member states very enthousiast about being part of the EU, there's definitely a market for .EU domains, maybe even more in Eastern Europe (where the enthousiasm about their EU membership is very big) then in countries such as UK or Germany. However, even for everyday/non-business use, give the extention time to grow, many people know very little about the EurID issues and don't really care as long as the domain is memorisable enough for their favourite websites. The start was bad, the future may be bright?

I do think .EU has its potential. And with every step Europe takes towards total political unification, it becomes more interesting.

 

[colombani]

.asia

Have you got thoughts about .asia extension ?
Difference with the .Eu extension ?

 

[jmcc]

Have you got thoughts about .asia extension ?
Difference with the .Eu extension ?

Well the .asia registry has the experience of seeing the morons in Eurid make a complete mess of an otherwise good ccTLD. It may do things differently. But I don't know if there is a shared sense of community in Asia as there is in the European Union. That said, it has the capability to be even bigger than .eu initially.

Regards...jmcc

 

[thaiboy]

There're some gems in any extensions. And Generic names have value in any extensions.

 

[colombani]

But I don't know if there is a shared sense of community in Asia as there is in the European Union. That said, it has the capability to be even bigger than .eu initially.

Right, in .asia community there is more ethnic dissimilarity than in .eu but there is a huge population.
I don't really know if I would buy asia domains

 

[smartpc]

On the .eu domain registration, yes alot of what looks like cybersquatting did go on and the eurid did make a hash of the whole thing. But part of the reason so much did go on was the failure of the eurid to promote the launch of the extension thus leaving only the domain cybersquatters/ investors/ industry lol knowing what was going on.

Here in Ireland you wouldn`t have known the domain extension existed before the launch, hell even the stuff that went on afterwards didn`t cause much of a stir.

Another reason I think would be the fact that european internet understanding lags behind the US and other countries well most of europe bar the UK and Germany maybe.

Although Cyprus seems to be well up on the understanding of the .eu extension - joke.

But this is old news now and every new registration dilutes any problem, europe isn`t going anywhere its here to stay and like its lands the .eu extension will grow. Things will balance out. I see your point jmcc with geo targetted domain extensions but companies are beginning to use the extension, and I already have 3 sites running on .eu domains and the sites I would be developing are big projects (I hope). Websites make rankings not domain names/ extensions, domain names make branding easier and the .eu extension just adds value in euro`s but most of all user perception, and increase click throughs in search results.

From my observations of google serp`s 2 months ago - 1 of my .eu extensions jumped over position of the .com. equivilent. This is only an observation of a domain/website in a low searched keyword but high value descriptive domain. Google doesn`t seem to be having any predudice against the .eu extension. Google themselves are sorting the serp`s into regions.

I would invest in the .asia extension for development purposes of course lol.

 

[jmcc]

Here in Ireland you wouldn`t have known the domain extension existed before the launch, hell even the stuff that went on afterwards didn`t cause much of a stir.

Another reason I think would be the fact that european internet understanding lags behind the US and other countries well most of europe bar the UK and Germany maybe.

It seems that only a few people in the Irish domains industry were paying attention and I've only seen such arguments used on a few Irish blogs.

Though the fact that about 80% of the businesses here that applied for a domain in Sunrise 2 did not get them did sour matters considerably.

The latest figures on the Irish .eu holding are iffy because approximately 6813 of those identified (and I've mapped about 2M of them) are on Irish hosters. There is a big difference between those figures and the ones that Eurid claims are Irish registered (31K Irish registered .eu domains). Ultimate Search (ultsearch.com) is using an Irish front company as are a few other US operations. The nexus requirement checking (that registrants were entitled to register .eu domains) was up to the registrars and many did not do proper checking so a percentage of .eu domains are registered with fraudulent and or ineligible addresses.

Although Cyprus seems to be well up on the understanding of the .eu extension - joke.

I've noticed some very interesting activity by Ovidio in the last few months - they've been cleaning their portfolio of potential trademark type domains.

But this is old news now and every new registration dilutes any problem, europe isn`t going anywhere its here to stay and like its lands the .eu extension will grow.

The next few months may have an impact as a slump always follows a landrush period. The intellectual property issues will still exist.

I see your point jmcc with geo targetted domain extensions but companies are beginning to use the extension

Most of the .eu is either parked or pointing at holding pages. Real use is far lower than other gTLDs.

Websites make rankings not domain names/ extensions, domain names make branding easier and the .eu extension just adds value in euro`s but most of all user perception, and increase click throughs in search results.

Yes but there has to be some element of credibility for a TLD in order to make it viable for people and businesses to develop websites with that extension. To date, that credibility has been lacking and most of the bigger companies with .eu websites are using them to redirect to their ccTLD or .com websites. The pureplays (large, well financed websites that use .eu as their primary brand) are absent.

Google doesn`t seem to be having any predudice against the .eu extension. Google themselves are sorting the serp`s into regions.

Yes but I think that Google hasn't been able to build up a good image of .eu webspace. Google's sorting of .eu sites may be based on IP location.

I would invest in the .asia extension for development purposes of course lol.

As will a lot of others. But it will probably not be a mess like .eu ccTLD.

Regards...jmcc