Increasing number of web stores active on .BE domains

Belgian domains are getting popular: an increasing number of domain names are being requested, and they are being increasingly used for e-commerce. But private individuals are also becoming increasingly interested in having a .be domain. Here are a few numbers…

The report published by DNS Belgium, the organisation that manages the .be ccTLD, shows that this country-code Top-Level Domain is doing well. Very well, actually. In fact, in 2012, people registered three times as many new domains as in 2005, which led to a total of 1,346,772 registered .be domain names. 70.9% of these domains are associated with a website and are used for e-mail traffic—a slight drop compared with 2011 (73.2%), while the number of holding pages has been increasing (+3% for companies, +6.4% for non-commercial domain names).

This means that a trade in domain names could emerge. Or is this just a (hopeful) sign that many companies are already ensuring their presence online, awaiting better economic times?
Of the websites associated with .be domain names, 37.52% are intended for corporate sites, a small decline compared with 2011. On the other hand, the percentage of .be domains associated with a web store showed strong growth and is now 4.32%. Finally, it seems that private individuals started having their own domain: the percentage of websites associated with a .be domain, used for a blog or a family, is now 6.15%.

By the way, when domain names are associated with a website, this latter is in 78.3% of the cases directly linked to this domain, and in 21.7% of the cases, it is redirected to a website on another domain. In 36.4% of the cases, this is another .be domain, in 21.2% of the cases, it is a .com, in 16.7% of the cases, it is a .NL domain, and in 15.3% of the cases, it is a .NET domain.

In terms of nationality: 65.46 % of the .be domain names are in the hands of companies or persons of Belgian nationality. As regards the nationality of the other 34.5% of .be domain owners, the Netherlands rank second (18.8%), followed by France (5.62%), Germany (2.39%), the UK (1.83%) and the USA (1.63%). It also seems that there is no need to take measures to require owners to have a Belgian establishment for .be domain names, like some suggested in the past.

In conclusion, we would like to stress that half of all the .be domain names were registered by 16 registrars. The top 5 even registered more than a quarter of the total. Combell, that ranks third, is the only Belgian company in this top 5, with a market share of 3.72%. And that is definitely worth mentioning!