Today, January 11th, 2009, TLD of European Union has reached 3 million domains! You can check stats at EURid website. Previous milestones were achieved on 07.04.2006 (first day of landrush) – 1 million and just three months later on 05.07.2006 – 2 million .EU domain names.
Today at 8:30 PM CET .eu domain name has surpassed 3 million mark and is the fourth most popular domain in Europe (behind .de, .co.uk and .nl).
Development of .eu domain
700 thousand new .eu Internet domain names in first four hours after .eu opened to the public.
1,0 million on first day of first-come-first-served launch of .eu
1,5 m .eu registrations in less than a week
2,0 m has been reached after three months after landrush on 3rd of July 2006
2,8 m mark passed on 7th of April 2008 – two years after launch of .eu TLD
3,0 m surpassed after 1010 days since landrush!
As the milestones show – .EU is one of the fastest growing new TLD and is getting stronger and stronger every year.
Top .eu registrations by country
1. Germany – 912,000
2. Netherlands – 407,000
3. United Kingdom – 368,000
4. France – 242,000
5. Poland – 171,000
6. Italy – 161,000
Source: EURid
Poland is definitely one of the leaders in .eu domain registration but has still far to go to catch up with Germany, Netherlands and United Kingdom. What is also interesting is the fact that number of .eu domains registered by Polish Internet users is similar or even higher than number of .com names (statistics say of about 160 thousand .com TLD used in Poland) .
Some of the .EU top sales
hotels.eu – €250,000 ( 2006 )
shopping.eu – €150,000 ( 2006 )
apotheke.eu – €51,000 ( 2008 )
home.eu – €30,000 ( 2007 )
onlinecasino.eu – €36,500 ( 2006 )
telefonbuch.eu – €28,000 ( 2009 )
gps.eu – €23,000 ( 2007 )
internet.eu – €20,000 ( 2008 )
money.eu – €16,000 ( 2008 )
ski.eu – €7,000 ( 2008 )
geld.eu – €5,500 ( 2008 )
network.eu – 4,600 ( 2008 )
Top EU TLDs
.de (Germany) – 12,5 million
.co.uk (United Kingdom) – 7,3 m
.nl (Netherlands) – 3,2 m
.eu (European Union) – 3,0 m
.it (Italy) – 1,6 m
.pl (Poland) – 1,3 m
.fr (France) – 1,3 m
.es (Spain) – 1,1 m
Domain Market in Europe 
RegFeeNames.com said
I still dont see manu .eu domains being used the UK.
It is good for branding if you are offering a european service but most people seem to stick to .co.uk or .com
Still this is excellent news if it is being used else where Im curious though how many owners are domainers and how many are business?
Regards,
Robbie
Daniel Dryzek said
Yes, not in all countries .eu has the same popularity. First of all .eu is more common in countries where domains are still quite expensive. For example – .pl domain is still 2, 3x more expensive than .eu domain name (standard market price). That encourage customers to buy cheaper .eu domains. There are also more available names in .eu TLD.
And you are right that .eu is perfect for companies that do business on many European markets. I think the more businesses towards European companies and individuals, the more popular .eu domain will get.
Some statistics of .eu usage were done by EURid but it doesn’t show clearly how many domains is parked and how many is used for website. I will try to dig into this issue and show some stats in near future.