John McCormac (aka jmcc on fora) over at WhoisIreland has collated a fair amount of .EU data, which does not paint a pretty picture (also reported here at the amusingly named isquattedyour.eu !)
John + co surveyed over 1,400,000 .EU websites and found out of "1.436 Million .eu websites in June. Less than 22% of these websites were actively developed".
Active Real Sites - 21%
‘Domained’ - 14%
‘Possible domained’ - 17%
We are taking domained as parked, sales or aggregation style sites , thus this is ‘certain’ domainer activity. ‘Possible domainer’ activity is based on holding pages.
It is mentioned that the ‘active’ sites stats could get close to 10% after refinement of survey techniques
John sums up the figures as "The usage of .eu is a disaster" , which for a compartively new extension is not good news. Activity in a domain extension encourages uptake by the none domainer which then leads to widespread man-in-street style awareness.
Such a poor launch can be confirmed in the only true way possible, that is political approval! The European Comission conducted an audit report into the ‘implementation, functioning and effectiveness of the .eu’ - the reports findings stated “The Registry has overall performed very efficiently during the start up phase of the .eu TLD and in full conformity with the legal framework”.
The icing on the cake was "the promotion of further registrations as well as that of the actual use of the .eu TLD by citizens, institutions and companies should be ensured.” How? is the EU going to setup a fund to subsidise domain name costs with the added domainer profit on top 