.EU Registrations Grow 7.6% In Q2 2012 To 3.6m
Registrations of .EU domain names continue to grow strongly with an increase of 7.6 percent in the year to the end of June 2012, according to the latest progress report from the .EU top level domain registry, EURid. This built on the 6.1 percent year-on-year increase reported in Q1 2012.
The second quarter includes the anniversary for when .EU was launched in April 2006 and traditionally sees more domain name deletions than other quarters, and hence a decline in registrations. However, Q2 2012 was different from previous second quarters. This year there was a quarterly net growth of 0.2 percent showing that 2012’s April anniversary had the smallest impact yet.
.EU is now the tenth largest TLD, and sixth largest ccTLD. .COM is the largest with 103.4m registrations, followed by (Germany) with 15.2m, .NET (14.7m), .TK (Tokelau – 11.2m), .UK (United Kingdom – 10.2m), .ORG (10m), .INFO (8.2m), .NL (Netherlands – 5.0m), .RU (Russian Federation – 4.0m) and .EU now with close to 3.7m.*
“.EU has maintained healthy registration rates for the first six months of this year, a fact reinforced by the Q2 2012 results,” said EURid’s General Manager, Marc Van Wesemael. “I am heartened by this growth which shows that Europeans continue to want .eu domain names despite the economic and political crisis still affecting Europe.”
EURid’s Q2 2012 report shows that Lithuania had the highest annual growth, with a 30 percent increase of .EU registrations compared with Q2 2011, followed by Malta (29%) and Austria (23%). During the same period, registrations in a further six European Union countries grew by over 10 percent, namely Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
.EU completed the second quarter of 2012 with 3.60 million registered domain names. During these three months, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia all saw quarterly growth of five percent or more.
Also during the quarter EURid launched YADIFA, an open-source name server implementation, as well as reducing fees for their Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) service by 50 percent.
YADIFA is for TLD operators and Internet Service Providers alike and is designed specifically for the efficient management of large internet zones and uses dynamic updates to instantly change domain name records. It is equally optimised to handle multiple Internet zones. The source code is also freely available.
The full report for Q2 2012 is available for download at link.eurid.eu/reports.
* the registration figures for ccTLDs above are updated from the EURid report with figures from the registry websites with the exception of .TK.
Share This
Related Posts
Follow Us!
