3 million .EU Domain Names Registered

EURid, who manages the .eu TLD, announced Monday there were now three million .eu domain names registered. The milestone was reached three years and one month after the sunrise period for .eu commenced in December 2005. The last million registrations were added in 19 months as registrations increase by around 40,000 to 50,000 registrations most months.While .eu has proved somewhat controversial in some circles, the numbers continue to grow rapidly with .eu the fifth largest ccTLD behind .cn (China) with around 13.5 million registrations followed by .de (Germany – 12,528,771), .uk (United Kingdom – 7,312,276) and .nl (Netherlands – 3,203,746). Today there are 3,002,345 .eu registrations.The controversy over .eu names comes about from the early days when there were claims most of the good .eu domain names were registered by investors as noted by Domain Name Wire, who also pointed out there have been very few notable .eu aftermarket sales. Exceptions noted are hotels.eu ($329,509) and shopping.eu ($196,803).Still, registrations continue to rapidly grow showing confidence in the young ccTLD. And it is the Germans who have registered .eu names with the greatest enthusiasm in total numbers, accounting for 912,583 registrations followed by the Netherlands (407,322) and United Kingdom (368,870). It is probably of no coincidence that these three are three of the larger European countries by population, and are the three largest countries in Europe for domain registrations within their own ccTLD.For more information on .eu domain names and EURid, go to www.eurid.eu.