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.eu has most business websites - Part I

6 Feb. 2014

Brussels, 6 February 2014 – 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, according to a new website categorisation report published today by the registry for the .eu top-level domain EURid.

“Our findings underscore the fact that businesses across the European Union continue to embrace .eu,” said EURid’s general manager, Marc Van Wesemael. “With its unique cross-border dimension, .eu is ideally suited for trading in many EU countries.”

The report, prepared in collaboration with the Leuven Statistics Research Centre, aims to understand how websites are used and also reveals that there has been a significant drop in the percentage of pay-per-click (PPC) websites on the web, from 20.6% in 2011 to 11.8% in 2013. That PPC sites have become less popular would indicate that revenue generated from this type of website is falling.

The findings are based on the results of the analysis of domain names taken from the zone files of the .com, .net. .org, .biz, .info, .pro and .mobi gTLDs and the .eu ccTLD. A random sample of domain names was selected from each zone file which was then assessed by a multilingual team of researchers. In total, around 5 000 domain names were assessed for each TLD. The website associated with a particular domain name was then categorised into one of eight categories: business, community, pay-per-click, holding page, institutional, password protected, error and pornography.

Further findings

  • Business is the most common use for websites across all top-level domains, with 30.5% of all websites being used for business purposes on average.
  • After business, the next most common use for websites is as a holding page (27.8%)
  • Older, generic TLDs still have distinctive usage profiles, for example .org maintains a high proportion of community websites
  • Pornography only accounts for 0.9% of websites, contradicting the commonly held perception that it is pervasive on the Internet.

 

The full report, “Website usage trends among top-level domains 2014”, is available for download at here. It forms part of the .eu Insights report series, which is based on surveys, studies and research conducted by EURid, in cooperation with industry experts and sector leaders.

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