Since the launch of .ευ in Greek script in 2019 which created a full complement of IDNs supporting all 24 languages of the European Union in their native scripts, the number of IDNs managed by EURid has increased by 4500 within the year of 2020. Registrations of IDNs has continued to rise since the end of 2019 by the close of 2020 with almost 41,000 registrations compared to just over 36,000 in 2019.
.eu IDN Numbers and analysis of web content in IDNs
2020 has seen the number of registrations of .eu IDNs increase across all .eu, .ευ and .ею. The number of .eu IDNs by the end of 2020 closed out at 41,647.
When drilling down further, the language of website content associated with Greek script .ευ showed a high proportion in Greek language with 40% in Greek. In addition, the analysis of the language of web content of .ею IDNs shows a high proportion associated with the Bulgarian language with over 50% (53%) in Bulgarian and 27% in English.
Analysis of web content of .eu IDNs show a large number of Latin-based European languages. German shows the highest percentage at 37% then Polish at 27%, English at 15% and Czech at 5%, Swedish at 4%.
Active or high-quality websites
When low quality (parking) content is removed from the analysis set, the proportion of English language websites decreases. This suggests that websites with content not in English may be more likely to be of a higher quality. As our methodology explains, we remove low quality, suspected parking sites from our data sample before undertaking the language analysis. Consistent in our findings for CENTR study in 2019, English language is more likely to be associated with low quality content. Once parking pages are removed from .eu, .ею and .ευ IDN sample, the prevalence of English language drops.
Redirects, Cyrillic and Greek Script
When looking at the number of Redirects for Cyrillic script, a time series showing the proportion of active and redirected top level IDNs in the .ею show that the number of active websites has slightly increased from 2019, as well as the number of redirects which as increased by just over 5% since 2019. Similarly, the number of Redirects in Greek script shows a very slight increase.
The proportion of IDNs registered across the three scripts supported by .EU TLDs (.eu, ею and .ευ)
EU Latin makes up 90% of the IDNs registered across the three scripts. .ευ in Greek makes up 7% - Greek. .ею in Cyrillic makes up 3%,
When looking at IDNs as a whole, after Han, Cyrillic is the second most common script of IDNs of all top level IDNs suggesting that there could be room for uptake of particularly .ею in Cyrillic.
An analysis of the language of Latin Script .eu IDNs show a large number of Latin script-based European languages with German at 37%, Polish at 27% and English at 15%.
Overall, the number of .eu IDNs across all .eu, ею and .ευ TLDs has increased over the course of 2020, with a general projection to increase further.