European domain registry EURid have recorded a rise in domain name registrations for .EU domain in their Q1 2018 progress report. As per the report, the rise in the .EU domain names is 9,234 and the growth is attributed to an increasing awareness and simplified registration processes for the domain name.
According to EURid’s report, the number of registrations for .EU domain names rose from 3,815,055 to 3,824,289 between Q4 2017 to Q1 2018. The report also stated that the renewal rates stood at 79.2%, a small increase from the previous quarter.
Amongst the countries that recorded the highest number of .EU domain names in Q4 2017, Ireland was the highest followed by Iceland and Cyprus, as per the report. It also mentioned that the top five countries with the largest number of .EU registrations are Germany (1,008,921), the Netherlands (507,014), France (349,263), the U.K. (323,166) and Italy (262,589).
The progress report also contains a section on the EURid-based categorization project for websites that started in Q1 2018. This project was initiated in a bid to understand how .EU domain names are used.
The initial findings from a sample of 225,000 .EU domain names suggest that 79% of domain names point to an IP address, 88% of resolving domain names contain content and 81% of resolving domain names have a working mailbox configuration.
Speaking about the project in detail, Giovanni Seppia, External Relations Manager at EURid, explained:
The website categorization project serves as additional information for the public to investigate how the .eu extension is used, which will be extremely useful for both small and large companies that want to distinguish themselves through the .eu extension