.eu one year on, now Europe’s third most popular domain with over 2.5 million domains names registered.
Europe’s internet domain .eu, this April celebrates its first year of being available to the public. Already over 2.5 million domain names have been registered. This makes .eu Europe’s third most popular top level domain (TLD) behind .de (Germany) and .uk (United Kingdom) and seventh most popular worldwide.
The .eu address is available to all companies and organisations located in the European Union, and to all citizens in the bloc’s 27 member states.
According to EURid sources, internationally the .eu domain is only surpassed by .info, .org, .net and, of as ever the paramount .com with its 52 million entries.
“When we opened .eu for the public in April 2006, we were convinced it would prove popular, but no one anticipated these high numbers. We are pleased to see that people from all European countries have shown an interest in conveying a European identity on the internet”, says Marc Van Wesemael, Managing Director of EURid, which is the not-for-profit organization appointed by the European Commission to operate .eu.
The peak of demand was seen in April 2006; the first month that the domain was open to the general public, 76 domain names were successfully registered every second.
On EURid’s web page for .eu statistics (http://status.eurid.eu/) you can see a complete list of many .eu domain names are registered per country of the domain name holder. The .eu domain has proven to be the most popular with the Germans who have registered 631012 names, followed by the British (373798 names) and with 28,522 registered by the Irish.