German people are used to .de, French to .fr, Italian to .il and so on, people in every of this 27 countries are used to specific ccTLD.

EU is good domain just for companies operating across all or most of EU countries (anyway is a very good choice to register domain name in every one of country they are operating in).
For us others is .EU forced evil, due to fact of paying for domains and typos in one more TLD.

However as a long time investment can be a good choice.

In addition to mnp comments above, I'd note that part of the problem was that "investors" snapped up a lot of the .eu domains. Real businesses couldn't get them easily, so they didn't use them. You need real biz using a TLD to get it to work.

.eu is too broad and therefore irrelevant. It's all about local.

Just like we don't think of ourselves as North Americans in the U.S.A, Europeans don't think of themselves as being from "Europe" ; They have strong identities associated with specific countries.

This is the same reason whey .asia will never be popular. The Japanese and Chinese can't stand each other. Neither can Indians and Pakistanis......they just will never think of themselves as "asians".

Is seems like .eu does okay, as it is tied with .co.uk as far as Sedo ccTLD sales at 15%, according to blurb in DN Journal.

Rick,

.eu is worthless.

Why?

2 reasons:

1.) The euro will dissolve, the European countries hate their currency pooled together, they are individualistic countries. Similarly, .EU, just like the euro, wrongly pools together a motley crew of countries.

2.) Europeans have national pride, allegiance not continental pride.

Respectfully,

Guy

They are local about everything. More family like. .eu is to global therefore useless over in europe.

.tv will end up the winner

Rick,

I actually agree with you but the EU label was something that was sort of forced onto European countries. Even the with EU - germans are still from german before the EU and so forth so while people embraced the EURO (having no choice - your money changes you sort of have to embrace it) the EU is still a collective definition only used by government vs the people.

In theory it should work but it probably never will due to a large number of reasons including how many are owned by domainers, lack of any real branding dollars spent by companies and the question of why do we need a .eu when we have a local country that defines us better.

Rick,

I actually agree with you but the EU label was something that was sort of forced onto European countries. Even with the establishment of the European Union - Germans are still from Germany before the EU and so forth. While people embraced the EURO (having no choice - your money changes you sort of have to embrace it) the EU is still a collective definition only used by government vs. the people.

In theory it should work but it probably never will due to a large number of reasons including how many are owned by domainers, lack of any real branding dollars spent by companies and the question of why do we need a .eu when we have a local country code that defines us better.

Think about if the top level extension .americas was established and Canada, Brazil and every country making up North and South America were expected to embrace the new extension. They just would not – no different than Europe and the .EU domains.

Although the region for .eu is different from the region for .asia there are common denominators that prevent those domains from taking off.

*Nationalism - just take a look at the World Cup where each member states were flying their own flags.

*Diverse languages spoken.

*Historical blood lines - WW1 & WW2. The English don't consider themselves Europeans; the French hate the English; and the Italians? they were very good in acting during the World Cup.

What makes me curious though is if the regional domain extension for Latin South America (.lat) will have the same trend as .eu and .asia. Any news on .lat ?

"I realize that I may not know what I’m talking about"

This happens to me over and over again. I am amazed that the .eu TLD hasn't ben more successful.

Perhaps all due to the ridiculous Sunrise rule that the Benelux accelerated trademark be acceptable for Sunrise applications. I confess, I applied for them myself.

Benelux trademark office have been the big winers in this TLD!

Nationalism trumps regionalism.

Dot com then ccTLDs. That's life.

I like .eu TLD a lot Rick! Please count my vote for .eu And companies in Poland like .eu extension as well. So it is not the same in whole Europe. It is a matter of time when .eu will get much more popular but not in all EU countries with the same strength.

Rick

Part of the problem with .eu is that the sunrise was abused heavily, so a lot of companies, cities and people in the EU couldn't get names. A lot of them applied, but the sunrise rules were incredibly complex and a lot of organisations' applications were rejected. We ended up handling a lot of quite high profile Irish applicants during sunrise and landrush and I still have the grey hairs to show for it!

In Ireland, for example, you simply do not see companies advertising with a .eu. Some big brands are using .eu, such as Sony, but the bulk of registrations appear to be more defensive than anything else.

Eastern Europe, however, is a different matter entirely and you will see them in use.

Of course trying to transpose an American English term onto a .eu domain name, as I've seen happen all too often, is not going to really work. The English speaking countries in the EU all use British English or a variant on it and most of the non-English speakers would learn English which is based closely around the Cambridge exams etc., (You will find some places doing the US exams, but they're not that common)

Having said that I was delighted to pick up a nice name in Milan at a reasonable price (I just need to find the time and energy to develop it!)

Michele

Hello.
I think one of the relevant factors by which eu domains do not have the desired success is not so well positioned in search engines such as those of the country (ccTLD) or com domains.
Regards