EURid’s Q4 2019 report shows effect of BREXIT
EURid published its Q4 2019 report and it shows the impact that BREXIT is having on the ccTLD. The number of UK registered .EU domain names declined from 240,887 domain names at the start of 2019 to 150,024 by the end of 2019. The main reason for this decline is that BREXIT means that the United Kingdom is no longer part of the European Union and UK registrations are being dumped. But there are some interesting movements and gains that show that this is not quite the case as UK registrants are using businesses and companies in European Union countries for their registrations. The number of Irish registered .EU domain names has also increased dramatically by 15,293 domain names to 50,041 over 2019. That’s a 44% increase. Some of that may be due to Northern Irish registrations but there are close linguistic ties between the Irish and UK market. The other curious gain is that of Portugal. It has gained 20,699 registrations in 2019 from a January 2019 count of 28,367 domain names. That 73% gain does look rather abnormal even if the .EU registration fee is low compared to that of other TLDs.
The .EU ccTLD has over 3.6 million registrations and that makes it one of the larger ccTLDs. However, at a EU country level, its share of the country-level domain name markets is lower as these markets are dominated by the local ccTLDs and .COM. This means that the .EU share of these markets is under 5% in many situations. Web usage in the ccTLD low compared to genuine ccTLDs. This is because the .EU has become a gateway TLD. A gateway TLD is where users go before being redirected to the relevant ccTLD gTLD or ccTLD website. A gateway website effectively serves as a single brand website that can be used for advertising.
The creation of .EU ccTLD, its land rush and web usage are covered in the Domnomics – the business of domain names Book available from Amazon.com The first chapters are free to read and cover how the European Commission and EURid were totally unprepared for what happened to the ccTLD when it launched.