I just read some interesting statistics on the eurid web site about the .eu domain registrations. .eu is a new Top Level Domain (TLD) and basically allows more people to have short and specific domain names. If your “companyname” is already taken in .com, .co.uk, .net and so on, you may be able to register it as “companyname.eu”.
Since Launch on the 7th April, almost 1.8 million names have been registered. There was also a breakdown of how many domains were registered by country of registration. Here’s a small extract:
| Country | Number of Domains Registered | Percentage of Total Domains registered |
|---|---|---|
| DE | 580,700 | 32 |
| GB | 339,234 | 19 |
| NL | 212,944 | 12 |
| IT | 106,010 | 6 |
| FR | 89,903 | 5 |
There are around 60 million people in the UK, roughly the same as France and Italy, yet we bought notably more of the new domains than they have. In Germany there are roughly 85 million people and they seem more taken with the new domains than we have been. The thing I find particularly interesting is that the Netherlands has only 16 million people, so they’ve been buying the new domains at quite a rate!
Let’s look at this another way. How many people in each country are there for each .eu domain:
| Country | Number of Domains Registered | Percentage of Total Domains registered | People per .eu Domain |
|---|---|---|---|
| DE | 580,700 | 32 | 146 |
| GB | 339,234 | 19 | 176 |
| NL | 212,944 | 12 | 75 |
| IT | 106,010 | 6 | 565 |
| FR | 89,903 | 5 | 667 |
The table shows that there is one new .eu domain for every 75 people in the Netherlands, wheras in France you’d have to find 667 people to find one with a .eu domain. I wonder what the reason is behind this big difference in buying domain names.
(note: Population numbers checked on eurostat web site)