Prominent COVID Terms in 2020 Domain Name Registrations

Domain name registrations in 2020 resulted in approximately 205,000 names throughout all of the Top Level Domains (TLDs). Top TLDs are as follows:

• .com 59.6%
• .org 8.3%
• .co 6.7%
• .net 4.5%
• .info 4.1%
• .online 2.0%
• .ru 1.3%

Average length of the terms within each of the TLDs was 15.78 characters in length. .com was 16.5; .org 15.5, .co 15.8; .net 15.4; .info 15.0 and .online was 15.1. Out of the TLDs with at least 25 corona/covid registrations in 2020, .me had the shortest length with 9.3 characters. Keep in mind, the dataset has to include ‘covid’ and/or ‘corona’ which means its a minimum of five letters in length.

So you might ask, what are the other terms in this dataset that people are registering?

I’ll let you ponder what the top 5 might be for a moment (don’t peek!).

Out of the 205,000 registrations, for every name registered with ‘corona’ there was 1.5 times the number registered in ‘covid’ i.e. 117,130 contained ‘covid’ and 75,771 contained ‘corona’.

So have a guess on the top terms registered along with ‘corona’ or ‘covid’?

If you guessed ‘19‘ – you got the top term but that was an easy one, what about other less obvious terms?

The term ‘virus’ is the clear winner, followed by ‘test’, ‘testing’, ‘free’, ‘vaccine’. Moving out of the top 10, it gets a bit more interesting.

Takeaways

A few brief takeaways from different industry perspectives:

Registry: Pretty decent chance the renewal rates on these domains will be
low so either you’ll need to offset the Domain Under Management (DUM) loss, set up targeted registrant focused campaigns or just be thankful that COVID is on the decline. 😉

Domainer: The COVID name wave is over. Unless you have a fabulous, relevant, short and COVID generic name, the probabilities of flipping it now are remote.   

Registrar: Please give yourself a serious pat on the back for stepping-up to
help stop malicious attacks, faulty science and illegitimate products when the entire planet was at its most vulnerable. Let’s hope that level of effort
required to help protect people declines significantly in 2021.