Survey suggests brands and public likely to welcome .eu

New research from Web-hosting and domain-name registration portal Hostway shows that UK companies are keen to adopt the .eu suffix for their companies and that nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) believe the new domain name will be important to their European business.

This will be promising news to marketers such as NetNames’ Jonathan Robinson, who earlier this year warned of complacency among many UK businesses (MW July 14).

The Hostway group questioned 200 UK businesses and found that 60 per cent believe that customers will eventually use .eu – rather than .com – when looking for companies based in the European Union.

The new domain name is for use by residents and companies in the European Community, and registration opens later this year.

Hostway also spoke to 200 consumers, of whom 50 per cent said they prefer to navigate to a region-specific website such as .co.uk, rather than to other domain names such as .info or .biz. And with 70 per cent saying that they associate .com websites with US content, adopting the .eu suffix could have a huge impact for businesses.

The .eu name is not intended to replace existing country-specific suffixes, but to help companies establish a pan-European presence online.

Hostway product manager Paul Halfpenny says: “The decision to establish the .eu domain name has been in the pipeline for around six years, and people are understandably enthusiastic about it – we’ve had over 500 calls and enquiries in the past couple of weeks. This reflects the strength of the .eu name – consumers and businesses have shown more interest in this domain than in any other launched in recent times.”