Who is CENTR?

The Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries, or CENTR for short, is an association of registry managers, whose objective is to promote and participate in the development of high standards for ccTLDs (country-code top level domains).  CENTR provides a forum to discuss matters of policy affecting ccTLD registries. In essence, CENTR acts as a channel for communication between registries, Internet governing bodies, and other organizations involved with the Internet.

CENTR publishes a number of papers and reports each year that provide excellent insight in the state of the domain name industry, especially in Europe. In fact, they have just released their annual report titled, Domain Wire, which provides some excellent statistics that will be of interest to many of our readers.

Here are some of the highlights:

-There are approximately 59 million domain names registered in Europe

-The .ME ccTLD (Montenegro) is the fastest growing among all European ccTLDs

-.DE is the largest ccTLD in the world (.DE recently surpassed the significant milestone of 15 million domains in April 2012)

-European ccTLDs grew approximately 9.2% between April 2011 and April 2012 vs. the lower grow rate of 7.7% for global gTLD registrations.

-The ccTLD in Europe with the highest number of domain names per capita is .LI (Lichtenstein) with 192 domains per 100 people, followed by .ME with 92 domains per 100 people.