.eu What is the future of .EU domains?

[gprod]

Usually I see lot of offers for good domain names, inc. one word domains with .EU
I was checked the sales on namebio.com - and find that .EU is not so popular, only Sedo and Golem are the marketplaces with reported sales...

What's the problem with this gTLD?

I see people said:
- Google doesn't like .EU's;
- European Union is not a country - there everyone speaks his own language;
- It's hard to register .EU domain because it's needs EU addres...

What is your opinion?
Do you have .EU in your portfolio?
Do you have a kinf of sales with .EU?

 

[jmcc]

It is not a gTLD. It is a ccTLD with no country. It is run by a registry that should not have been given the contract to run it and its supporting legislation and regulations were crafted by people ignorant of the domain name business. It never really recovered from being over-speculated during the landrush by people outside the EU and the registry tried to lie its way out of that mess. It never recovered.

Approximately 75% of Irish and UK companies/businesses did not get their .EU domains when they applied due to a pondscum intellect designed "scheme". That and the massive speculation by non-EU warehousers, often using dodgy Benelux "trademarks" to game the Sunrise restrictions and domainers killed the ccTLD in the English speaking market. It isn't a ccTLD where there's natural development and usage and most of the registrations are for brand protection purposes rather than use. Some eastern EU countries like it more than .COM but it is considered a junk TLD in other EU countries where it only represents less than 5% of the domain name footprints of those countries (actually closer to around 1% in some). There's approximately 27 languages in the EU so it is not a single language areas and typical English language keyword domains are not worth as much as they would be in .COM TLD.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Kate]

As a rule, Europeans prefer their local extensions. International companies that operate across Europe will register every ccTLD they need, and produce localized versions of their websites as appropriate.
The TLD is not very much relevant or useful because there is little pan-European sentiment.
The EU has 27 member countries and nearly as many national languages so it's not an homogeneous, well defined market. The EU is perceived as a remote and unpopular entity, thus the .eu TLD just doesn't convey the kind of proximity and good faith that the local extension will.

 

[boker]

It is not a gTLD. It is a ccTLD with no country. It is run by a registry that should not have been given the contract to run it and its supporting legislation and regulations were crafted by people ignorant of the domain name business. It never really recovered from being over-speculated during the landrush by people outside the EU and the registry tried to lie its way out of that mess. It never recovered.

Approximately 75% of Irish and UK companies/businesses did not get their .EU domains when they applied due to a pondscum intellect designed "scheme". That and the massive speculation by non-EU warehousers, often using dodgy Benelux "trademarks" to game the Sunrise restrictions and domainers killed the ccTLD in the English speaking market. It isn't a ccTLD where there's natural development and usage and most of the registrations are for brand protection purposes rather than use. Some eastern EU countries like it more than .COM but it is considered a junk TLD in other EU countries where it only represents less than 5% of the domain name footprints of those countries (actually closer to around 1% in some). There's approximately 27 languages in the EU so it is not a single language areas and typical English language keyword domains are not worth as much as they would be in .COM TLD.

Regards...jmcc

Which of these countries do you name as 'easterns'? Also, if you check the statistics, over 60% of .eu domains are used, over 20% are redirects and around 12% are parked, so not really just brand protection.
Also, with over 3 million registrations, is in top 10 extensions. It's not what it should have been, but it's not useless.

 

[jmcc]

Which of these countries do you name as 'easterns'? Also, if you check the statistics, over 60% of .eu domains are used, over 20% are redirects and around 12% are parked, so not really just brand protection.

No. Eurid's "statistics" on usage are not accurate and its "methodology" is not robust or reliable. The last "survey" I remember reading was a tiny survey of 5,000 domain names categorised by college students. I, on the other hand, ran a somewhat larger multi-million domain name survey on .EU ccTLD. Poland is an Eastern EU country as is the Czech republic. Basically the Eastern EU countries are the 2004 accession states and more recent additions.

This is from a recent statistical survey:
Active: 14.07%
Brand Protection: 2.71%
Clone (Other TLD site): 0.62%
In page redirect: 0.97%
External TLD Redirect: 10.62%
Forbidden/Not Found: 3.11%
Holding Pages: 20.83%
Internal site redirect: 2.61%
No HTML: 1.66%
Affiliate Lander: 0.03%
External TLD Redirect (brand): 9.0%
Duplicate content (2): 0.3%
Duplicate content(>2): 0.19%
PPC: 4.12%
Other redirect: 1.38%
Sale: 2.95%
HTTPS redirect: 1.83%
Unavailable/site error: 1.02%
Adult Aff lander: 0.01%
Social Media lander: 0.7%
In-zone redirect: 4.31%

Also, with over 3 million registrations, is in top 10 extensions. It's not what it should have been, but it's not useless.

It was intended to be a replacement for the .COM in the European Union market. It failed because of poor legislation, poor rules, poor marketing and poor management. Zone file counts mean very little these days. Now to people who don't know how TLDs are used, 3M might seem to be a lot but when these figures are broken down over the component EU country markets, they represent less than 5% of the domain name footprints in each of those countries. As a .COM alternative, it should have been in the region of 15 to 30 million registrations. A significant number of UK .EU registrations are from cyberwarehousing holding companies that are owned by non-EU businesses. The .UK ccTLD has approximately 10.4 million registrations so that does put that 307K registrations into some perspective and it also has at least 3.8M gTLD registrations. With the Irish market, there are approximately 22K .EU registrations. There are approximately 237K .IE domain names registered and 168K COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO domain names on Irish hosters. There's also about 5K NGT domain names and 33K .UK domain names in the Irish market. The Spanish and Swedish .EU counts have been stagnant for years. The German .EU count is in decline and has been for a few years now. The Austrian .EU count is high due to a drop catcher operation. It bounced between Austria and Gibraltar in 2016 and then back again in 2017.

Regards...jmcc

 

[boker]

No. Eurid's "statistics" on usage are not accurate and its "methodology" is not robust or reliable. The last "survey" I remember reading was a tiny survey of 5,000 domain names categorised by college students. I, on the other hand, ran a somewhat larger multi-million domain name survey on .EU ccTLD. Poland is an Eastern EU country as is the Czech republic. Basically the Eastern EU countries are the 2004 accession states and more recent additions.

This is from a recent statistical survey:
Active: 14.07%
Brand Protection: 2.71%
Clone (Other TLD site): 0.62%
In page redirect: 0.97%
External TLD Redirect: 10.62%
Forbidden/Not Found: 3.11%
Holding Pages: 20.83%
Internal site redirect: 2.61%
No HTML: 1.66%
Affiliate Lander: 0.03%
External TLD Redirect (brand): 9.0%
Duplicate content (2): 0.3%
Duplicate content(>2): 0.19%
PPC: 4.12%
Other redirect: 1.38%
Sale: 2.95%
HTTPS redirect: 1.83%
Unavailable/site error: 1.02%
Adult Aff lander: 0.01%
Social Media lander: 0.7%
In-zone redirect: 4.31%

It was intended to be a replacement for the .COM in the European Union market. It failed because of poor legislation, poor rules, poor marketing and poor management. Zone file counts mean very little these days. Now to people who don't know how TLDs are used, 3M might seem to be a lot but when these figures are broken down over the component EU country markets, they represent less than 5% of the domain name footprints in each of those countries. As a .COM alternative, it should have been in the region of 15 to 30 million registrations. A significant number of UK .EU registrations are from cyberwarehousing holding companies that are owned by non-EU businesses. The .UK ccTLD has approximately 10.4 million registrations so that does put that 307K registrations into some perspective and it also has at least 3.8M gTLD registrations. With the Irish market, there are approximately 22K .EU registrations. There are approximately 237K .IE domain names registered and 168K COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO domain names on Irish hosters. There's also about 5K NGT domain names and 33K .UK domain names in the Irish market. The Spanish and Swedish .EU counts have been stagnant for years. The German .EU count is in decline and has been for a few years now. The Austrian .EU count is high due to a drop catcher operation. It bounced between Austria and Gibraltar in 2016 and then back again in 2017.

Regards...jmcc

I would like to know what map did you used to put Czech republic in eastern Europe? If it's so, than Austria should be there as well. Doesn't have anything to do with the idea that it was part of the communist countries, Berlin was in that block as well, and you don't say that Germany is part of the eastern Europe. Also, the .eu registrations in Czech republic and Poland are around 470k, so around 7-8% of the total .eu registrations, but you don't say anything about the 2.7 million .eu domains registered by Germany, France, Nederland and the other western countries.
So, you want to make me believe that eurid's statistics are not accurate, even do they are done by the same guys who are doing the statistics in all EU, but your statistics are accurate, even do you don't name the source, you don't name the organization who made them? Doesn't sound right, no? I don't know why, but I'm sure that your statistics are coming from UK and they are well intended always. Also, even if you don't believe eurid's statistics, they also say that .eu is used more often than .com in 90% of EU countries, probably the only country were is not happening is UK. I live in Ireland from 2009, I have a website using .eu with traffic from coming mostly Ireland, UK, Nederland and Germany and you are trying to tell me how it should be, using some no name statistics.
UK was always against EU and everything that was related to EU and you guys were never happy inside EU, you have used EU just to help your economy in the 70's, but with this Brexit maybe you will be happier and everybody can mind their business afterwards.

 

[jmcc]

Thanks @jmcc
It's pleasure for me to read this threat and your posts here, great advices, great knowledge!

I even have some statistics that I made earlier. While I may not concentrate on the enduser sale prices of domain names, I have to watch the major trends in the TLDs.

Eurid has a hard job trying to market the .EU thouughout the European Union. The way that it allowed the ccTLD to be plundered in the Landrush effectively killed the .EU as a .COM competitor and it also killed demand in the English-speaking market. A lot of the warehousers who hoovered up US English and generic English terms in the Landrush found that they could not sell them and large portfolios of .EU were being dumped on the market in 2007 and 2008. What happened as a result of this was that many people in the EU switched their attention to their local ccTLDs. The ccTLD registries began promoting their own ccTLDs heavily in their markets. The other advantage that the ccTLD registries had was that Domain Tasting was effectively keeping the good COM/NET/ORG drops away from the public so the ccTLDs were in a position to fill a lot of the demand for new domain names. It is hard not to feel sorry for Eurid as it was really out of its depth in running what was essentially a generic gTLD rather than a ccTLD.

Regards...jmcc

 

[BaileyUK]

I strongly appreciate the strength of discussion between you 'Boker' and 'Jmcc' but you following quote of usage had me nearly falling off my chair

Also, if you check the statistics, over 60% of .eu domains are used, over 20% are redirects and around 12% are parked, so not really just brand protection.

I don't invest in .EU, maybe as you say Boker, It's because I'm a Brit. but any source reporting usage as you've quoted is just Wrong

 

[Kate]

@boker you have to understand that @jmcc has been doing that research for a long time, it is not partisan. Just an inconvenient truth
Also, you said that with over 3 million registrations, .eu should be in the top 10.
First of all the stats is one thing, but many extensions are inflated these days. The actual usage is not in proportion to the number of registrations.

If you just look at the figures (about 3.8M today) you might think it's big and therefore a popular TLD. But the reality is that it's stagnating. The figure was around 3.7M 4 years ago...
So the net gain is a mere 100K registrations in 4 years, which is very little for a TLD that is open to registrants of about 30 countries (EU/EAA). Like what, a huge market of 500 million eligible people ?
Reality: European ccTLDs perform better individually. If you consider a ccTLD like .pl or .cz (not even talking about the bigger extensions like .fr/.de/.uk) they achieve the same kind of growth on their own.

There is no surprise here: local extensions prevail.
It is evident that Europeans are not embracing .eu. It is not just a British thing.
If you ask me what is the added value of this TLD, I don't know. Yet I am moderately pro-EU.

 

[-AR-]

I think it depends on Europe's political developments. If the EU expands and the countries continue further integration it may do very well but that may still be many years from now.

Europeans are culturally very connected with their country and traditions and they do not see the EU as a federal state. I would place my bets on each countries ccTLDs doing well but with such a fast changing world who really knows for certain??

 

[jmcc]

I would like to know what map did you used to put Czech republic in eastern Europe?

It was one of the 2004 accession states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_European_Union

Also, the .eu registrations in Czech republic and Poland are around 470k, so around 7-8% of the total .eu registrations, but you don't say anything about the 2.7 million .eu domains registered by Germany, France, Nederland and the other western countries.

The .EU ccTLD is quite stagnant in the old EU countries. The bulk of the registrations are old, brand protection registrations. That's why Eurid has high renewal rates (>75%). But in terms of new registrations in some of those old EU countries, the numbers of registered .EU domain names is declining. The Czech and Polish .EU registrations would represent approximately 12% or so of the .EU ccTLD. (The current count is approximately 3.8M.)

So, you want to make me believe that eurid's statistics are not accurate, even do they are done by the same guys who are doing the statistics in all EU, but your statistics are accurate, even do you don't name the source, you don't name the organization who made them?

Perhaps you were not reading closely. I said that Eurid's usage "statistics" are not accurate. That 60% active figure is rubbish. Eurostat does not do Eurid's usage statistics. Eurid's usage statistics were based on a tiny 5K domain "survey" with college students doing the categorisation. Eurostat publishes statistics for the EU. Eurostat is not Eurid.

Doesn't sound right, no? I don't know why, but I'm sure that your statistics are coming from UK and they are well intended always.

My statistics are coming from the UK? No. I just happen to track the UK ccTLD among other TLDs (COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO and about 1,230 other TLDs). I did run a survey on .UK web usage at the same time I ran the last .EU survey.

Also, even if you don't believe eurid's statistics, they also say that .eu is used more often than .com in 90% of EU countries, probably the only country were is not happening is UK.

Absolute rubbish. there are more active .COM websites in the Irish market than there are Irish registered .EU domain names. The same goes for most of the other EU countries. The .COM was the main TLD throughout the EU for decades until the ccTLDs began to take over the markets in the mid 2000s. Most countries in the EU are now ccTLD positive in that their markets are dominated by the local ccTLDs. The .EU ccTLD only launched in 2005. I haven't seen Eurid make a claim that .EU is used more often than .COM in 90% of EU countries.

The .COM is still the main legacy TLD throughout the EU and it its usage figures in EU countries is still far higher than .EU ccTLD. The main market axis in most countries is 80% .ccTLD/COM. That's 80% of the registrations in these markets.

I live in Ireland from 2009, I have a website using .eu with traffic from coming mostly Ireland, UK, Nederland and Germany and you are trying to tell me how it should be, using some no name statistics.

I know the Irish market better than you ever will. Actually, I probably know the statistics of most countries better than most people because I have to publish gTLD counts for countries each month. There are more .IE and .COM websites in the Irish market than there are .EU websites. There are more .NET websites than there are Irish .EU sites in the Irish market. There are more .UK registrations in the Irish market than .EU registrations. The UK is seen as a natural market for Irish businesses and many Irish businesses register their .CO.UK domain name if it is available and that's before the Northern Ireland situation is taken into account.

UK was always against EU and everything that was related to EU and you guys were never happy inside EU, you have used EU just to help your economy in the 70's, but with this Brexit maybe you will be happier and everybody can mind their business afterwards.

So you lived in Ireland from 2009 and that makes you an expert on the Irish market as well as the UK? Have you learned to tell Irish people from British people yet?

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

If you just look at the figures (about 3.8M today) you might think it's big and therefore a popular TLD. But the reality is that it's stagnating. The figure was around 3.7M 4 years ago...
So the net gain is a mere 100K registrations in 4 years, which is very little for a TLD that is open to registrants of about 30 countries (EU/EAA). Like what, a huge market of 500 million eligible people ?
Reality: European ccTLDs perform better individually. If you consider a ccTLD like .pl or .cz (not even talking about the bigger extensions like .fr/.de/.uk) they achieve the same kind of growth on their own.

If you look at the renewal rates for a TLD that has plateaued/stagnated and the renewal rates are around 80%, it is a classic brand protection registration TLD.

Most of the registries only publish a blended renewal rate for one year registrations and veteran/older registrations. The reality is that the one year renewals on some of the legacy gTLDs are below 60% for .COM (approx 56% for 2016 registrations in .COM) and lower for the non-core gTLDs like .INFO and .BIZ. Depending on the ccTLD, the renewal rates are upwards of 70% and they are still growing so there is a shift in growth away from the gTLDs to the ccTLDs in most EU countries. That makes the .EU ccTLD an odd ccTLD. But looking at the per country statistics shows that it is beginning to shrink in some countries. The big problem is that it has depended in the German market as its main engine for growth but the German .EU count has been falling for a few years now.

This is what the one year renewal estimates (January 2016 to October 2016) look like for the legacy gTLDs:
COM: 56.81%
NET: 52.98%
ORG: 60.16%
BIZ: 32.77%
INFO: 31.63%
MOBI: 28.13%
ASIA: 38.84%
(AMBIONIC total 55.07%)

Some of this was due to the Chinese Bubble registrations washing out of the zones but a few of the NGTs are below 10% on one year renewals.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Disintegration will happen...
It is already started... and just question of time...

 

[jmcc]

Hard to believe it's been around since 2006.

Sunrise 2005 and Landrush 2006. Eurid had to halve the price of the renewal rate coming up to the first year's renewal anniversary as it thought that the drops were going to be much higher if it did not. It was at about 2.4 million at the end of the first year.

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

Still, the extension can survive)
There are seems to be almost over 100K domains active in .su (Soviet Union) extension -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su
And it is still available to registration.

Regarding the use of .eu
I'm from Estonia. Couple of years ago, have analysed what domain extensions are used by companies (scraped one popular directory site). The stats were as follows:

Total - 60000
.ee - 47000
.com - 5000
.eu - 4800
.net - 1000
others

This is the January 2018 estimate for Estonia in the COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO/MOBI/ASIA gTLDS:

Estonia EE
Total: 29,544
COM: 22,646
NET: 3,040
ORG: 1,666
BIZ: 364
INFO: 1,727
MOBI: 70
ASIA: 31

The Q3 figure for Estonian .EU domains was 22,953.

Regards...jmcc

 

[-EM-]

Eu will separate when the US will do the same.
I don't understand how non Eu users are so sure about things in the EU. It's like me giving lessons to someone from the US about us.

 

[-EM-]

Like dot pro

 

[boker]

Guys with 100K in monthly sales are usually don't spend whole days on the domain forums...
At least 95% of them.

100k showed by namebio, I didn't say that they where my sales....but if you can take a small pie from it, a small pie from pro, a small pie from co, a small one from .com and you can't go wrong.

 

[boker]

But neither .com should not be considered to invest all your cash, as well as .de, ngtls, .org and others...the same goes for each industry, if you invest everything in one place, the risk is higher...so diversity can't be bad.

 

[-EM-]

What is your experience with .PRO?
10-20 domains and 1 year???

I said it just to create the idea of people talking things without having enough experience and knowledge. Your reaction was same as mine.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

The EU collapse - one of the primary targets for Putin... Billions are spent yearly into this mission...
So the mentioned planning document by the German army is even very optimistic prediction...

 

[RozasMD]

The fact of the matter is that the EU is not popular (for good and bad reasons), and European citizens identify with their home country and ccTLD. Consumers don't easily relate with artificial extensions.

You keep saying EU is not popular among European people and that is completely wrong.

It's not popular among British people. Period.

The economic crisis was a tough time, now that's being left behind. UK euro-skeptics used it to force Brexit. And then there's the Greek case, who suffered under austerity measures. That's all:

Sharp increase in favorability of EU in many countries in last year

If you're watching it from a British point of view, your opinion might be biased.

PS: UK has always been on the 'individualistic' side regarding EU.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Brain washed by the Russian TV???

 

[boker]

Washed brain by the Russian TV???

I'm coming from a country where 98% of the population it's against Russia, so there is no Russian TV. It's just simple economics, with 15 trillion gdp you can't have to much interest in a 90 billion market, it's less than Hungary, who has 9 million population. Ukraine is in this agreement from an economical point of view and EU is from a political point of view.

 

[-EM-]

The uk did a stupid move getting out the EU. I'm surprised with Greece that wants to get out.