The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) has published its GLOBAL TLD REPORT for the first quarter of 2021. The report provides statistical updates, assesses the world trends in domain name registration and focuses on national domains of European countries. European country-code domains posted 4.9 percent median growth in the first quarter on the same period of 2020. Georgia’s .GE national domains posted the highest growth (up 15 percent, as of late March, the country had 52,000 registered domain names). Georgia was followed by Portugal’s .PT national domains (up 11 percent, 1.3 million names) and Ireland (.IE, up 10 percent, 310,000 names). It is interesting, that new top-level domains .BAR and .CAM grew much faster than all other gTLDs (up 415 percent and 412 percent, respectively).
The median buy price of a CENTR member ccTLD domain is 10 euros with the renewal price at 14 euros. Europeans prefer national domains of their respective countries (54 percent of all registrations by local residents, up one percent on the first quarter of 2020).
The report also pays attention to the use of domain names. For example, 25 percent of European ccTLDs queried were broken or had no functioning content. A further 16 percent led to a registrar holding (parked) page. Registries consider them a liability because the chances for extending their registration are much lower than those of domains linked with active websites. It should be noted that European ccTLDs seem to fare better than gTLDs. Actually, 43 percent of gTLDs queried were broken or had no functioning content, and another 22 percent had been parked.
