EURid, which manages the united national European domain .EU, has published its Q1 report. Of course, the growth of the domain zone, although small, was the main positive point. Recently the European domain has recorded a consistent decrease in the number of registered names. Observers were unanimous in saying that Great Britain’s decision to leave the EU – Brexit – is the main reason for the negative trend.
Brexit became official in the first quarter of this year. Of course, this didn’t make Brits more optimistic about .EU. The number of domains registered by British individuals and organizations had decreased by 142,600 by the end of March, which is 24 percent lower than the year before. In spite of that, the domain name has grown a bit in general: there were 3,579,689 names registered there at the beginning of 2020, but that grew to 3,623,050 by the end of the first quarter. This is a 0.5 percent increase.
This growth can be attributed to the efforts of Portuguese registrars who organized several large promotional campaigns during the first quarter. As a result, the number of domain names registered by Portuguese individuals and legal entities in .EU, grew 64 percent over three months to 80,000.
