Future of .eu domain names - Go up/down in value?

[Azam.biz]

On the anniversary of the launch of .eu domain names, just wondering how Year 2 would go for the TLD.

Was chatting to a domainer in Canada yesterday who said .ca domain names took a few years to take off.

What do you think about the likely direction of the .eu TLD? Will it end up being a success story or not?

 

[Damion]

I see a steady flow of sales appearing on Sedo which are being reported in this thread started by Gazzip.

Sedo only reports some of their sales and not all of them so i am sure more are going under the radar at Sedo or other marketplaces and even privately.

I'm sure the .eu extension will do better in coming years and keeping in mind that the plans for the EU that have failed previously will be put through in the future if we like it or not making the .eu extension even more interesting.

 

[Web Master]

.EU has become a landmark between the era of national online market and the new global European economy. .EU wil be more used and thus becoming more popular. The marketing prices of .EU will be higher.

 

[Mike]

This may be a risky statement to make, but i believe that the .eu extension has the potential to come into the "big 3" and eventually get behind the .com
Certainly, this is not going to happen tomorrow, but with the add on of new countries to the European Union/Community, the value of the .eu should equally rise. I believe that the country domains inside the EU will remain to be of importance, but corporations and investors that are looking to get across multiple countries, it's inevitably either a .com or a .eu extension. Since .com is by far and large more expensive than .eu, the solution is relatively clear. :imho:

 

[gazzip]

Was chatting to a domainer in Canada yesterday who said .ca domain names took a few years to take off.

From little acorns grow mighty trees - It just takes time


.

 

[Kate]

I would advise to hold .eu for 5 years (only keep the good names).
Same for .us.
There have been a few good sales in both TLDs but the market has yet to mature. IMO .us is the most promising of the two.

 

[Sam]

After this year's plethora of drops, we shall see if the tld has more end user use... if not prepare for failure again for year #2.

 

[Gerrit]

I still believe .EU can be very big. But it needs time. People here still are used to mainly .com and their own country's extention. However, slowly .eu is finding its way and the first advertisements using an .eu domain see the light of day, the first big websites using .eu domains are being spread via mouth-to-mouth advertisement ... So the progress may be slower than expected, it's still growing and it still holds a lot of potential.

I am curious to see what effect the new EU member states will have on the .eu demand and value. Countries like Romania are very excited about their EU membership and the businesses find new markets in the former Eastern Europe thanks to the free trade rules of the EU.

 

[jmcc]

I am curious to see what effect the new EU member states will have on the .eu demand and value. Countries like Romania are very excited about their EU membership and the businesses find new markets in the former Eastern Europe thanks to the free trade rules of the EU.

Well XSS.RO hosts one of the biggest squatter operations using domains that were registered in the landrush by a UK front company apparently owned by a Swiss national. Apart from that, the Romanian take up has been low (only around 7000 doms). The other new states are also comparatively low. Poland is relatively solid with around 82K doms and the Czech Republic has about 52K though I think that some problem landrush domains ended up there for some reason. One US registrar used Estonia as the country for a lot of fake registrations so Estonia's count is a bit high I think. Apart from that, the main activity in .eu should be in the core states and that is exactly how it is playing out.

I posted the .eu (based on a survey of approximately 2M .eu domains) and com/net/org/biz/info/ie stats for the top 20 .eu hosters at the start of April on my blog http://blog.whoisireland.com so you can get some idea of the way things stand. The strange thing is that the UK hosters are very underrepresented in the list because many of the US warehouser operations using UK front companies are concentrated on US hosters such as Enom's NAME-SERVICES.NET among others. The appearance of Sedo and Fabulous.com and warehousers/squatters like BLIXEM.NL and XSS.RO in the top ten hosters is definitely bad news for .eu ccTLD.

I really think that one method of restoring confidence in .eu ccTLD would be to redelegate the ccTLD to a competent registry run by professionals. A bunch of monkeys throwing darts at a printout of .eu would have done a better job than its compliance department. And as for the DNS.be registry software - that is junk that is unsuitable for a large domain such as .eu ccTLD. The flurry of parallel trading that happens in a landrush did not happen because of this kludge - that and the fact that the morons in EURid launched without a domain trade/transfer facility in place.

Regards...jmcc