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A parting Tucows employee sent out a beautiful email today thanking everyone for the amazing and valuable time she spent here with the herd. She gave us all the parting gift of sharing the following words of inspiration from the late Mother Teresa that I had to share in kind;

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; Forgive them anyway.

 

If you are kind, People may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway.

 

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway.

 

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway.

 

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway.

 

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; Be happy anyway.

 

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway.

 

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you've got anyway.

 

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; It was never between you and them anyway.

Good luck Tetyana, following these precepts will result in a success for you that's immeasurable.

I've been afforded the unique position of having spent the last 5 years of my career heavily involved in both the aftermarket and traditional domain industries. This background provided a unique perspective that allowed me the foresight to recognize the potential of .EU in the aftermarket early on when most if not all other TLD's hadn't even seen close to the level of growth as .COM.

The domain aftermarket is mostly driven by the mindshare and demand of Internet users, and for most surfers even today .COM is the only immediately recognizable TLD out there. It's no wonder then that when I asked Domainer customers of mine years ago if they were going to make a play for .EU when the launch was still in the rumor stages, most if not all stated they would wait to see how it would play out. According to SEDO, it seems to be playing out fairly well.

Now SEDO is of course incented to hype this market, obviously from a transactional perspective the more demand that can be drummed up, the more revenue they could potentially acquire on their platform, but I feel there are a couple of differentiating factors that should lead any investor to take a closer look at .EU where I'll point toward the somewhat tempered growth of the .INFO domain space as a learning example.

Back when .INFO was still going through landrush, there was allot of hype from the European market due it being the first unrestricted alternative to .COM. Combine this with the the fact the European market had somewhat missed the initial growth spurt of the Internet resulting in most “good” .COM's having already been taken by North American owners, and you can see why all of the excitement developed across the pond. With 5 years to mature, and a tremendous number of unique and even somewhat aggressive marketing efforts under the Afilias belt, .INFO still remains smaller than .ORG from a transactional perspective in the traditional market, with the occasional blip of a 5 figure transactions in the aftermarket. Why, you may then ask, has .EU already seen more domains registered than .INFO and aquired aftermarket transactions in the six figure range with less than half a year of history under this fledgling registry's cap?

in·fo (nf) 
n. Informal.

Information.

Info, an abbreviation that is prevalent and powerful in the west, but meaningless or rarely used in most non-English speaking countries, which leads to my answer… its all about Mindshare.

The .EU registry is riding on the tails of a massive educational and political campaign by most if not all EU members, which was designed to acquire buy-in from the population for the consolidation of the Union in the first place. Add this to the fact that the European market has been competing to catch up with North America on the Internet for a long time and you see how there would be a jump on this bandwagon of an EU based domain space that's meaningful to all yet also transcends any language barrier.

So, with this TLD you have mindshare through millions if not billions spent on marketing, a user base pining for an alternative to .com that separates them from North America, and combined addresses most if not all of the shortcomings of the INFO hype. A definite investment win in my books.