.eu renewal rate tops 80% in 2013

Brussels, 13 March 2013 - On average, 81% of .eu domain names were renewed in 2013, according to the latest progress report from the .eu registry EURid. This is the seventh year running that .eu has maintained such a high renewal rate, indicating that .eu domain name holders are a loyal group.

“Internet users want to be able to express themselves online through TLDs that inspire feelings of trust, quality and security,” explains EURid General Manager Marc Van Wesemael. “.eu has always had the reputation of being a quality and trustworthy domain, and the renewal rate is proof that our registrants feel the same way.”

That end-users, particularly businesses, are keen to benefit from the quality and trustworthiness conveyed by the .eu brand is further underlined by the fact that the TLD has the highest percentage of business websites when compared with the largest gTLDs, according to the latest website categorisation report published by EURid in collaboration with the Statistics Research Centre of the University of Leuven (Belgium).

37.8% of .eu websites are used for business purposes, compared with an average of 30.5% of websites under gTLDs like .com, .biz and .net.

Throughout 2013 EURid worked to consolidate and even further develop the security and trustworthiness of.eu, launching a pilot programme in Q1 to check and improve the quality of WHOIS data and achieving certification for the ISO27001 security standard in Q4, amongst others.

In 2013, the total number of .eu registrations increased in 19 of the 28 EU Member States.

The full report for Q4 2013 is available for download here.