Business websites predominate online

Brussels, 24 November 2011 – Business is the most common use for websites across most top-level domains, according to a report published by EURid, the .eu registry.

The report, which aims to understand how websites are used, reveals that on average 26.5% of websites are used for business purposes. .eu, with 31.4%, has an above average business usage.

"Our findings underscore the fact that businesses across the European Union have consistently embraced .eu," said Marc Van Wesemael, EURid’s General Manager. "They realise that .eu is ideal for trading in many EU countries because it has a unique cross-border dimension."

.eu maintains its strong business profile for the third consecutive year.

Findings are based on the results of a manual analysis of 50 000 websites across 11 top-level domains: .biz, .com, .eu, .info, .mobi, .net, .org, .pro extensions and three European national TLDs. Each website was categorised into one of eight categories: business, community, pay-per-click (PPC), holding page, institutional, password protected, error and pornography.

Further findings include:

• Behind business, the next most common uses for websites are error (23.5%), holding page (20.6%) and PPC (17.3%), possibly reflecting the low cost of registering domain names
• Older generic TLDs still have distinctive usage profiles, for example .org maintains a high proportion of community websites
• Pornography only accounts for 0.4% of websites, contradicting the commonly held perception that the Internet has a large number of pornographic websites.

The report Website usage trends among top-level domains is available for download at http://link.eurid.eu/insights. It forms part of the .eu Insights report series, which is based on surveys, studies and research conducted by EURid, in cooperation with industry experts and sector leaders.