Only 13.37% .eu Websites Active/Unique - .eu is a disaster zone

The latest WhoisIreland.com .eu web survey shows that the .eu ccTLD is in serious trouble. Out of 1723638 websites checked, only 13.37% of sites were active/unique. As a ccTLD for Europe, it is a disaster zone. Brand registrations accounted for 7.78% of registrations. The percentage of duplicate content sites was 6.02%. The percentage of websites that redirected elsewhere was 16.68%. The percentage of PPC/warehoused websites was 14.22%. The percentage of holding page sites was 16.79%

In terms of use, .eu is way below other ccTLDs. It is a junk extension. While some companies use .eu for a Europe-wide identity it is largely ignored as another example of useless EU bureaucratic corruption and waste in the rest of the European Union. If it wasn’t for German speculation and registrations driving the ccTLD, the .eu would have completely failed long ago.

The post-landrush development that takes place in a well run ccTLD is just not happening in .eu ccTLD. This is due, mainly, to EURid’s incompetent handling of the landrush and Sunrise phases. The small businesses and developers that would have provided that initial development spurt were missing. They were missing because the fools in EURid took no action to prevent .eu being speculated, cyberwarehoused and cybersquatted. The EURid people were simply outclassed by even the simplest of speculators faking the country field in the whois data while including a complete US postal address. Even years later, some of these bogus registrations are still there because EURid is too incompetent to detect them. But then detecting them would reduce the size of the .eu zone and EURid has to keep up the pretence that .eu is a great success for their clueless political masters in the European Commission.

The .eu ccTLD is a failure. It is a failure because of EURid’s utter incompetence in dealing with the cyberwarehousing and cybersquatting issues. These guys were too stupid to realise what was going on when the .eu ccTLD was being stolen by non-EU speculators and cybersquatters. And now .eu is a disaster zone - irrelevant to citizens of the EU and a joke of ccTLD in the industry. Perhaps it would be best if EURid was stripped of the administration of .eu and the ccTLD redelegated to a more competent registry. Otherwise the longterm outlook for .eu is dire.

In real terms, .eu already begun to resemble a third choice TLD like .info or .biz. While the total registrations figure may seem impressive, broken down on a country by country basis and compared against those country’s ccTLD and TLD holdings, .eu is not making any significant inroads into these markets. Even the cyberwarehousers are giving up on .eu ccTLD.
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Written by John McCormac on January 29th, 2008 with 9 comments.
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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Paul
#1. January 29th, 2008, at 4:54 PM.

Have you done any research on .mobi or .asia.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#2. January 29th, 2008, at 7:00 PM.

I ran a similar survey on .mobi in June last year but nothing since. I think that around 129K of the .mobi sites were parked on Godaddy’s coming soon site. But there is natural web development happening with .mobi. The .asia landrush isn’t until next month (as far as I remember) and the best time to do a survey on that would be sometime in the Autumn.

The next surveys are .ie and .co.uk. The .co.uk one will cover about 3.77M .co.uk domains.

Trackback Mention from Irishwebmasterforum.com
#3. January 29th, 2008, at 9:24 PM.

.eu price drop - Irish SEO, Marketing & Webmaster Discussion: Eurid are trying very hard to promote the namespace. They also announced a couple of initiatives in recent days ...

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com gpmgroup
#4. February 7th, 2008, at 10:38 PM.

Its interesting to compare the number of pages Google chooses to index.

http://www.chart.info/stats19.htm

(To put things in perspective .info has just over half the number of pages .co.uk namespace has indexed by Google.)

Trackback Mention from Domainernews.net
#5. February 8th, 2008, at 8:38 AM.

Only 13.37% .eu Websites Active/Unique - .eu is a Disaster Zone | Domainer News - Daily updates from the Domain Industry: To read all of John’s posting on WhoisIreland, see blog.whoisireland.com/2008/01/29/only-1337-eu-websites-activeunique-eu-is-a-disaster-zone/

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Olly
#6. February 8th, 2008, at 5:34 PM.

I’m holder of a national German brand an pre-registered a domain name in sunrise phase. However, the application wasn’t accepted by EUrid due to a “flaw in the documents” I had to send to them. Well… I had to pay a fee for this pre-registration process and should then use the EUrid ADR process to possibly get the domain name.
This was too much bureaucracy for me. Since I didn’t want to spend more money for nothing I didn’t go further with .eu registration.

Trackback Mention from Cafeauademontreal.wordpress.com
#7. February 9th, 2008, at 7:42 PM.

Stiri scurte despre domeniile internet « Cafeaua de Montreal: februarie 9, 2008 by stash 1. European Registry of Internet Domain Names a ajuns la 2,772,246 ...

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Tom O’C
#8. April 9th, 2008, at 11:06 PM.

Real shame when you think about it, it could of been something good

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Ambrand.com
#9. April 27th, 2008, at 2:09 PM.

The .eu TLD has a place… third place… if you are in Europe and the local ccTLD is taken (and lets assume the gTLD) then go for the .eu

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