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.eu What is the future of .EU domains?

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gprod

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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?
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Still not sure about the "rarely" one.
I see these things live.
And you probably have seen many more local ccTLD sites and TV/media advertising for sites using the local ccTLD or .COM.

Regards...jmcc
 
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This is the idea, if you target just one country in Europe, you are using the cctld, if you target 3-4 neighbour countries than most of the local companies will use .eu and if you have mostly an international presence and most of the sales are made in other corners of the world, than you use .com( but that's the case of under 5% of the EU companies).
No. The local ccTLDs have become so powerful that foreign companies will use the local ccTLD, where possible when targeting a country. That's why Google uses .IE, .CO.UK, .DE etc. Most large companies will redirect to the local ccTLD website.

Regards...jmcc
 
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The "offical" usage statistics from Eurid make no such claim about 60% usage. I've checked. And Eurid's "methodology" on its 5,000 domain name survey is considered to be completely unreliable by professionals. You have probably misunderstood web usage percentages and are confusing e-commerce percentages with active websites. The number of e-commerce websites in a TLD is always going to be lower than the number of active websites.

Regards...jmcc
Check the latest EURID statistics from 2017, 12% are parked, 26% redirects and over 60% active...you can think what ever you want about EURID 'methodology', but just saying that peoples should trust your statistics and not the official one's will not change anything.
 
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Check the latest EURID statistics from 2017, 12% are parked, 26% redirects and over 60% active...you can think what ever you want about EURID 'methodology', but just saying that peoples should trust your statistics and not the official one's will not change anything.
So where does Eurid make this laughable claim? Is it still using a 5,000 domain sample size?

Regards...jmcc
 
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No. The local ccTLDs have become so powerful that foreign companies will use the local ccTLD, where possible when targeting a country. That's why Google uses .IE, .CO.UK, .DE etc. Most large companies will redirect to the local ccTLD website.

Regards...jmcc
I'm not talking about google, amazon and the others...I'm talking about actual local companies, registered in each country. For example one friend selling baby products is using cctld for his country and .eu for the region( he's selling in another two countries) but he doesn't care about .com.....this is actual usage, not your statistics, registrations or redirects
 
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I'm not talking about google, amazon and the others...I'm talking about actual local companies, registered in each country. For example one friend selling baby products is using cctld for his country and .eu for the region( he's selling in another two countries) but he doesn't care about .com.....this is actual usage, not your statistics, registrations or redirects
Your friend would probably sell more if he used the local ccTLDs.

Regards...jmcc
 
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Check the latest EURID statistics from 2017, 12% are parked, 26% redirects and over 60% active...you can think what ever you want about EURID 'methodology', but just saying that peoples should trust your statistics and not the official one's will not change anything.
From Eurid's last attempt at a usage survey in 2014 (a massive 5,000 domain names):
26% Error pages.
10% PPC.
19% Holding pages.

Eurid never made any claim about 60% of .EU sites being active. It claimed that 37.8% of its sites were used by business. However, its methodology was fundamentally flawed in that it couldn't distinguish between framed content or redirects and the sample size was only 5,000 domain names out of over 3.8 million domain names.

Even Eurid's own figures was, in reality, only claiming 16.97% were used for business because it tried to obscure the real figures by presenting the usage percentages of the "content" sites (45%) rather than as the total of domain names surveyed.

Regards...jmcc
 
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Your friend would probably sell more if he used the local ccTLDs.

Regards...jmcc
I don't know how much experience you have with a real life business, but I can tell you for sure, after years of testing that if you are using a .co.uk for your business, almost nobody from France or Germany will buy anything from you( and the other way a well), but if you are using for the same shop .e tld, the traffic from Germany or France will be over 10 times higher.
 
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From Eurid's last attempt at a usage survey in 2014 (a massive 5,000 domain names):
26% Error pages.
10% PPC.
19% Holding pages.

Eurid never made any claim about 60% of .EU sites being active. It claimed that 37.8% of its sites were used by business. However, its methodology was fundamentally flawed in that it couldn't distinguish between framed content or redirects and the sample size was only 5,000 domain names out of over 3.8 million domain names.

Regards...jmcc
I'm talking about 2017 not 2014. I don't know and I don't care if the statistics are based on 5000, 5 millions or 1 domain name, if they are good enough for European Commission, they are good enough for me. The next thing to say is that you have made some new statistics in which Trump is loved by 90% of US citizens and that all EU countries will go broke after Brexit and that everybody should believe you, because the official statistics are not good.
 
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I'm talking about 2017 not 2014. I don't know and I don't care if the statistics are based on 5000, 5 millions or 1 domain name, if they are good enough for European Commission, they are good enough for me. The next thing to say is that you have made some new statistics in which Trump is loved by 90% of US citizens and that all EU countries will go broke after Brexit and that everybody should believe you, because the official statistics are not good.
So where are these wonderful 60% 2017 usage figures from Eurid? Do they even exist? They aren't mentioned in the European Commission report submitted by Eurid.

Regards...jmcc
 
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The official statistics are not saying that all of the 3 million of them are used, but that over 60% of them are used, if you can prove that the official data is wrong you should prove otherwise, not just say that 'my statistics are the right one's
Can you provide a link to that claim ?
There is one gotcha here, it is what you define as 'use'. I guess everybody has their own definition.
 
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Can you provide a link to that claim ?
There is one gotcha here, it is what you define as 'use'. I guess everybody has their own definition.
Eurid claimed that .EU was 45% content and 55% no content for their 2014 survey, Kate,
The people in Eurid didn't claim 60% usage.

Regards...jmcc
 
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Can you provide a link to that claim ?
There is one gotcha here, it is what you define as 'use'. I guess everybody has their own definition.
I'm on my mobile now, but the data is taken from EURID, yesterday when the discussion has started, when I reach my laptop I will look for the link. At least I'm attaching links, not showing some stats that I own and people should believe me.
 
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I'm on my mobile now, but the data is taken from EURID, yesterday when the discussion has started, when I reach my laptop I will look for the link. At least I'm attaching links, not showing some stats that I own and people should believe me.
You are making the claim that .EU is 60% active. You haven't supplied any links to prove that Eurid made that claim.

Regards...jmcc
 
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You are making the claim that .EU is 60% active. You haven't supplied any links to prove that Eurid made that claim.

Regards...jmcc
I will reach my laptop later on and I will attach the link...curious that you didn't asked for the link yesterday, when I've posted, you were just attacking EURID saying that your stats are more accurate, without saying that they are yours and you were acting like they were made by the EU commissioner himself.
 
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I will reach my laptop later on and I will attach the link...curious that you didn't asked for the link yesterday, when I've posted, you were just attacking EURID saying that your stats are more accurate, without saying that they are yours and you were acting like they were made by the EU commissioner himself.
The EU commissioner hasn't a clue about web usage statistics. I'd be most interested to see where Eurid made a claim of 60% usage and so would every ccTLD and gTLD registry in the world. Eurid would too. :)

Regards...jmcc
 
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Boker, you are putting too much faith in official statistics. They can be accurate and misleading at the same time.
You have to understand that the .eu registry is a bureaucracy, it has to justify its existence and the salaries paid. They have to present reports that look good or at least acceptable.
Just looking at the registration stats you can see an extension that is underperforming. There is nominal growth, so the public will not notice until you dig deeper and compare with other extensions.

Domainers should never take the registries spin at face value. No registry is going to tell you that they run a TLD that is a failure, that is not getting traction among end users, where registrations are stagnating or declining, where bona fide usage is low or non-existent, or that the zone is semi-dead. Yet this the reality for a good number of extensions. You know it. We all know it.
.eu is not doing well. It's not dead but somewhat superfluous.

Personally, I trust more @jmcc's research than the PR statements made by the registry. Because I have a rough idea of his methodology and the way he works, and I also do my own TLD surveys. I have a lot of raw data too.

AFAIK Eurid are not releasing any detailed data for their stats, so I am not sure why you think theirs are more trustworthy.

I think the future can only be like the present: .eu will remain a stagnant TLD with lots of redirects, defensive registrations. You know, like those 'old' extensions such as .name that have been around for a long time but everybody forgot why they even exist :)
 
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Boker, you are putting too much faith in official statistics. They can be accurate and misleading at the same time.
You have to understand that the .eu registry is a bureaucracy, it has to justify its existence and the salaries paid. They have to present reports that look good or at least acceptable.
Just looking at the registration stats you can see an extension that is underperforming. There is nominal growth, so the public will not notice until you dig deeper and compare with other extensions.

Domainers should never take the registries spin at face value. No registry is going to tell you that they run a TLD that is a failure, that is not getting traction among end users, where registrations are stagnating or declining, where bona fide usage is low or non-existent, or that the zone is semi-dead. Yet this the reality for a good number of extensions. You know it. We all know it.
.eu is not doing well. It's not dead but somewhat superfluous.

Personally, I trust more @jmcc's research than the PR statements made by the registry. Because I have a rough idea of his methodology and the way he works, and I also do my own TLD surveys. I have a lot of raw data too.

AFAIK Eurid are not releasing any detailed data for their stats, so I am not sure why you think theirs are more trustworthy.

I think the future can only be like the present: .eu will remain a stagnant TLD with lots of redirects, defensive registrations. You know, like those 'old' extensions such as .name that have been around for a long time but everybody forgot why they even exist :)
It's not that I'm trusting anybody and I know that all registries are trying to show the better angle of their data. But to say that jmcc has more accurate data then European Commission I think it's just wrong.
Also, I'm talking about real life, not statistics: I have a friend using .eu for a music related shop, in Ireland. Before he was using the cctld and was loosing a lot of customers fro outside the country. Now he's using .eu for western Europe and there aren't anymore issues between countries. Also, I have a cousin using .eu for selling in 3 EU countries, I've registered the .com with a coupon for him last year, in case he will want to use it. Now, at renewal, I've asked him if he wants to renew it and he said to drop it, because he doesn't have any use for it, he doesn't want to go outside Europe and if he will start selling in other EU countries, he will use the same .eu and for his own country he's using the cctld...ant these is the case of a lot of businesses in Europe, they don't need .com, if they don't go outside Europe. By the way, in a full year when I owned his equivalent .com, just 2 persons in one year have checked it, probably my cousin, when in the same year he was selling in 3 countries and 5 shops, so he didn't lost any traffic to .com Also, I know at least other two guys who own an offline shop in different countries and they are using .eu for their website, because they are close to the border and selling to more than one country, but they never thinked about using .com If you count the latest google update from 3 months ago, when all the cctlds have priority in front of gtlds, than it will change even more the big picture. If you ask me, I think that EU will be more united after Brexit and this will make them to wish for unification and in 10-15 years you will see .eu used the same as is used com in US now.
 
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It's not that I'm trusting anybody and I know that all registries are trying to show the better angle of their data. But to say that jmcc has more accurate data then European Commission I think it's just wrong.
I doubt that the European Commission has statistics or insider data that are any more detailed than what Eurid has been handing out to them.

If you ask me, I think that EU will be more united after Brexit and this will make them to wish for unification and in 10-15 years you will see .eu used the same as is used com in US now.
No. European integration will simply not result in increased demand for the .eu TLD.
Member countries will continue to exist, so will their ccTLDs. End of the story. The only question is where .eu fits in. It does not represent a clear or homogeneous market but a patchwork of countries with different histories and realities. It is an artificial extension created for political reasons but not out of consumer demand.
The biggest end user of .eu is the EU itself. Without it, the TLD would be dramatically less visible.
 
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Eurid's 2014 survey of 5,000 domain names had 44.9% content and 55.1% "non content based". It gave the breakdown of website usage (this is important as it is not percentages of domain names) is as follows:

Holding page: 18.9%
Business: 37.8%
Error: 26.6%
PPC: 9.6%
Personal: 1.9%
Institutional: 4.1%
Password protected: 0.9%
Adult: 0.2%

If the 44.9% as content sites is taken as the 100% then the adjustments for domain name percentages are:
Holding page: 8.4%
Business: 16.97%
Error: 11.94%
PPC:4.31%
Personal: 0.85%
Institutional: 1.84%
Password:0.26%
Adult: 0.09%

Eurid also claimed that approximately 25.5% of the zone redirected. Of those redirects, 5.8% went to .COM, 1.8% to .NET, 5.1% to other .EU sites and 4.6% to .DE sites. This leaves 29.6% (if the redirects % is applied to the 5K sample's 55.1% non content based) . The "Business" % is close to the 14% Active figure and may have included brand protection and clone sites. The Eurid's PPC % of 4.31% compares well to the 4.13% in the survey. The Eurid Error % is11.94%. The No Response % in the survey is 17.61%. The unsophisticated Eurid redirect % of 25.5% compares to a combined external TLD/In zone/HTTPS redirects % of 25.76% in the survey. The Eurid survey was on 5,000 sites in 2014. The survey percentages I quoted were from September 2017. Eurid was trying to emulate my survey work but it ran out of college students. :)

Regards...jmcc
 
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Eurid's 2014 survey of 5,000 domain names had 44.9% content and 55.1% "non content based". It gave the breakdown of website usage (this is important as it is not percentages of domain names) is as follows:

Holding page: 18.9%
Business: 37.8%
Error: 26.6%
PPC: 9.6%
Personal: 1.9%
Institutional: 4.1%
Password protected: 0.9%
Adult: 0.2%

If the 44.9% as content sites is taken as the 100% then the adjustments for domain name percentages are:
Holding page: 8.4%
Business: 16.97%
Error: 11.94%
PPC:4.31%
Personal: 0.85%
Institutional: 1.84%
Password:0.26%
Adult: 0.09%

Eurid also claimed that approximately 25.5% of the zone redirected. Of those redirects, 5.8% went to .COM, 1.8% to .NET, 5.1% to other .EU sites and 4.6% to .DE sites. This leaves 29.6% (if the redirects % is applied to the 5K sample's 55.1% non content based) . The "Business" % is close to the 14% Active figure and may have included brand protection and clone sites. The Eurid's PPC % of 4.31% compares well to the 4.13% in the survey. The Eurid Error % is11.94%. The No Response % in the survey is 17.61%. The unsophisticated Eurid redirect % of 25.5% compares to a combined external TLD/In zone/HTTPS redirects % of 25.76% in the survey. The Eurid survey was on 5,000 sites in 2014. The survey percentages I quoted were from September 2017. Eurid was trying to emulate my survey work but it ran out of college students. :)

Regards...jmcc
In real life I can tell you that I know more small companies using .eu than using a .com, even if 80% of the companies are using cctld, so .eu and .com are used each by around 5% of the companies. Maybe somebody should tell to the guys from soho.eu and others that they are stupid for redirecting the .com to the .eu and we should all listen to domainers and everybody should use .com to keep them happy.
 
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In real life I can tell you that I know more small companies using .eu than using a .com,
The few people in that you know in real life does not equal the 3.8 million domain names registered in .EU ccTLD or the 131 million in .COM. You were also claiming to know more about the Irish market than anyone here but never mentioned if you had any .IE domain names. You were also claiming that Eurid claimed to have had a 60% active figure when even Eurid's own figures above don't back up your claim. Measuring web usage in TLDs is a very difficult task and Eurid understands this fact. Its Finite college students method is not scalable.

Regards...jmcc
 
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I doubt that the European Commission has statistics or insider data that are any more detailed than what Eurid has been handing out to them.

No. European integration will simply not result in increased demand for the .eu TLD.
Member countries will continue to exist, so will their ccTLDs. End of the story. The only question is where .eu fits in. It does not represent a clear or homogeneous market but a patchwork of countries with different histories and realities. It is an artificial extension created for political reasons but not out of consumer demand.
The biggest end user of .eu is the EU itself. Without it, the TLD would be dramatically less visible.
I wonder if you have more inside info than I have...on 15 february will be presented a study commissioned by EU which will be used as the start of federalization of EU, talking about a single army, a single government an other things until 2030. Do you have any extra info that the european cctlds will still exist, if there will be a single army, a single government and so on? Maybe you should share your info with us. Nobody knows exactly what will happen and if EU plans will finalize, but to say that the cctlds will still exist and this is the end of story....either you know much more than us and European Commission or you don't care what will happen and you are trying to impose your ideas to others.
 
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Disintegration will happen...
It is already started... and just question of time...
 
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The few people in that you know in real life does not equal the 3.8 million domain names registered in .EU ccTLD or the 131 million in .COM. You were also claiming to know more about the Irish market than anyone here but never mentioned if you had any .IE domain names. You were also claiming that Eurid claimed to have had a 60% active figure when even Eurid's own figures above don't back up your claim. Measuring web usage in TLDs is a very difficult task and Eurid understands this fact. Its Finite college students method is not scalable.

Regards...jmcc
I don't own any .ie domains, but I own .eu and .co.uk domains used for selling on irish market, so from my point of view, because I'm connected to real life not just stories, I tend to trust my instinct and knowledge, than to believe you that .com is better for me on these markets and loose my business because of that. Believe, it was tested over and over and not only by me....you loose customers using a .com in Europe as a small company and in some instances you loose money if you use just the cctld and you want to sell to others, outside your country but inside Europe.
 
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