The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) has published a report on the key trends of the first half of the year on its website. According to the text, the median growth of European national domain zones by July was about 2%. The indicator should be considered encouraging, especially considering that at the beginning of this year growth rates were at record lows. The report's authors explain this by two factors. The first is a decrease in the activity of registrants with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. If during the pandemic and the restrictions it caused, the demand for domain names increased sharply, then as the bans eased, many small and medium-sized businesses chose to return to their usual, “offline” business models and did not consider it necessary to renew domain registrations.
The second reason is economic instability and inflation processes that have affected most European countries. They did not bypass the domain market either: the median cost of annual name registration in national European domains increased compared to the previous half of the year and reached 10.3 euros. This is lower than in the .COM zone (12.6 euros), but the economic factor, of course, could not but affect the weak growth rates at the beginning of the year.
However, in general, European country codes have overcome difficulties. True, the average level of registration renewal, although it remained very high - 80.8% - nevertheless decreased slightly compared to the previous period. But the ratio between the number of new registrations and the number of deleted domain names (median demand ratio) was 1.2, which is even slightly higher than last year’s figure.
If we talk about the use of domain names, country code domains of European countries continue to demonstrate a very high level. Approximately 43% of all registered domain names have active websites. For comparison: in the .COM domain this figure is 29%, and in the .ORG domain – 33%. And the result of new generic top-level domains looks very low - only about 16%. In the Russian national domains .RU and .РФ this figure is 63% and 60: respectively (domains on which existing websites, single-page sites and web applications are located are taken into account).
