More than two million .eu web addresses have been registered since the domain name was launched in December, making it the third most popular domain in Europe.

Eurid, the organisation that manages the .eu domain, launched a sunrise registration period in December 2005, open to trademark holders wanting to register their brands and company names. The landrush .eu registration period, open to all, kicked off in April this year.

Since the launch, more than two million .eu domains have been snapped up, according to Eurid. They have proved most popular in Germany, where 631,000 .eu addresses have been registered, followed by Britain with 374,000.

Although the new European domain has some way to go to catch up with the original .com domain, which currently has more than 50 million instances, it is proving popular compared with some other new domains and country-code top-level suffixes. The Netherlands .nl and Italian .it domains, as well as .biz aimed at businesses, all have fewer registrations, for example. The .uk domain has almost five million instances.