DomainNews.com reports that there are now more than 2.5 million .eu domains registered.
According to the European Registry of Internet Domain Names (EURid), the current number of .eu registrations is 2,537,659. Germany has most registrations with about 815,000. The United Kingdom has 354,000, France 172,500 and Italy 125,000.
When .eu first opened for business in December 2005, there was a four month period of phased registration, known as Sunrise, during which only holders of prior rights for a name could apply for that name as a .eu domain. In total EURid received over 345,000 applications for about 245,000 unique names during this period. Most names had one or two applicants while a few had quite a number of applications. Among the most applied for names were sex.eu, hotel.eu, travel.eu and jobs.eu.
The .eu landrush was in April 2006. At that time, many domain speculators from outside the European Union created hundreds of phantom registrars in order to improve their chances of successfully registering valuable .eu domains which they were going to resell later. This practice allowed some companies to get coveted .eu domains and left genuine registrars without a chance. Therefore, EURid’s landrush process has been criticized by many.
Number of .eu registrations, as of December 2006, sorted by domain length:
.eu domain names with only 2 characters: 994
.eu domain names with 3 characters: 28,720
.eu domain names with 4 characters: 77,033
.eu domain names with 5 characters: 102,974
.eu domain names with 6 or more characters: 2, 234,776
Sources: EURid Annual Report 2006 (PDF), EURid Statistics Page
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