February 11, 2014
Well over a third of all .EU domains are used in conjunction with business purposes according to a report published by the ccTLD's registry.
EURid states 37.8% of .EU websites are used for business, compared with an average of 30.5% of web sites under generic Top Level Domains such as .COM.
The study examined:
- Three original gTLDs: .com, .net and .org
- Four of the new gTLDs: .biz, .info, .pro and .mobi
- One relatively recent ccTLD: .eu.
Around 5,000 domain names were assessed for each TLD.
After business purposes, the next most common application for all domains was as a placeholder page - i.e. no active site as such. 19.5% of the names studied were redirects; i.e. the names redirected to another domain. 9.3% of domains examined hosted personal pages.
One of the highlights of the report is a significant drop in the percentage of pay-per-click sites - domains that lead to pages mostly consisting of ads, rather than real content. Levels have dropped from 20.6% in 2011 to 11.8% in 2013.
"This indicates that PPC revenues are dropping and that people are responding
by linking their domain names to holding pages or, in some cases, by building actual
websites," states the document.
Of the TLD's and names examined, least popular with businesses were .ORG and .MOBI.
Another finding will help to dispel the myth of the prevalence of adult web sites; which accounted for less than 1% of the domains examined.
The report, Website Usage Trends Among Top Level Domains 2014 can be viewed in full here (PDF).
With regard to Australian domains, a survey carried out last year found 80% of .AU registrants use their name for business purposes. As at the time of writing, 2,776,140 .AU domains have been registered.
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