Business is the main user of domain names said Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager of EURid on the first day of the annual Domain Pulse being held in Hamburg, Germany.In a survey involving eleven top level domains – with the results for most TLDs anonymous – EURid found that one quarter (26.5%) of domain names were used for business purposes. In the categories used for the survey, the second most common use was “error” with less than a quarter of domains (23.5%), which included the domain not being configured correctly or only used for email.One in five (20.6%) domains was being used for a holding page, 17.3 per cent for pay-per-click advertising and ten per cent for community groups or personal use. Somewhat surprisingly, only0.4 per cent of domains surveyed was used for hosting pornographic websites.The survey analysed 50,000 websites across 11 TLDs including the three original TLDS (.COM, .NET and .ORG), three ccTLDs among the EU’s ten largest, four new TLDs (.MOBI, .PRO, .BIZ and .INFO) as well as, naturally, .EU.There were also quite distinct differences in the use of domains registered for gTLDs and ccTLDs Wesemael noted. Domain names used for business purposes ranged from a high of 42.3 per cent for one of the ccTLDs, with the other two ccTLDs close behind, while the lowest was for the two new gTLDs, .MOBI and .PRO.Websites used for pay-per-click advertising purposes was highest among .COM (27.3%), .BIZ (27.7%) and .INFO (27.1%) while lowest for the four ccTLDs (4.5% to 12.8%) and .PRO (10.7%).And for not one of the TLDs surveyed did pornographic websites account for more than one per cent of domain names.It was interesting to know, as Wesemael explained, that the older gTLDs and ccTLDs had distinct usage profiles that when shown on charts was very distinctive, with older TLDS having a higher percentage of business websites, while ccTLDs have even more business websites than the gTLDs. And .EU had a higher than average use of domain names for business websites with 31.4 per cent of domain names used for business compared to the average of 26.5%. Wesemael says this shows .EU being used for business, and in particular cross-border business.The Domain Pulse conference continues Tuesday with live streaming coverage available here, with no translations available, so most presentations are in German.The EURid report, Website usage trends among top-level domains, is available for download here.