Almost 4 million .EU domain names

While the percentage of .EU domains per country is constantly increasing, the number of IDNs is also growing. Here’s an overview of the key figures…

In a unified Europe, it is important for export-oriented companies to be able to offer their products or services throughout the EU. And what better way to make this possible than to have a .EU domain name? Companies are getting increasingly aware of this and the constant increase in the number .EU domains proves it.

From 2,249,670 in Q3 2006, the number of .EU domains in Q1 2013 increased to 3,722,077. Of these, 1.5% are IDNs, i.e. domain names with non-ASCII characters. Compared with the first quarter of 2012, the .EU domain increased by 3.6%, which is somewhat lower than the national ccTLD market in the European countries in that same period (5.4%), but still significantly higher than the growth percentage of gTLDs such as .COM, .NET, .ORG or .INFO (1.6%).

As regards the distribution across the different member states of the EU, Luxemburg is the country that has be largest number of .EU domains per 1,000 people (31.5), followed by the Netherlands (29.1). Belgium ranks ninth, with 11.8 .EU domains. If we compare this with the number of ccTLDs per 1,000 people, the Netherlands are at the top of the list (311.3), surprisingly followed by Denmark (219.0) and Germany (188.0).