As with any massive change/panic or revolution— there are always opportunists. We’ve been tracking some of these changes just to see how quickly they change. For instance, if you look at any brand, you can see it ebb and flow over time. Often in tandem with search traffic using Google Trends or other traffic analysis tools. One of the leading indicators of this kind of change are domains. Coronavirus gives us a good chance to look at how domains are being built and for what purpose.
We have an internal tool to monitor domain changes that allow us to see things like propagation of brand hijacking, phishing sites, and the like. We turned it on Coronavirus. In the last couple of days (within 48-72 hours) we’ve seen a pretty hefty growth in the number of new domains being created.
In just the last couple of days for the “.com” top-level domain alone we’ve seen 837 new domains popping up with “corona” in the name. That’s a pretty strong indicator that the market is seizing opportunities, whether it be by virtue of domain squatting or otherwise.
You can see some examples like “anticoronavirusshop.com” which is clearly a new online store, an affiliate pointing people to existing companies, or a domain squatter. Other examples are “coronacancels.com” where someone is probably putting up a site to monetize ads, while they say what is and isn’t closed due to Coronavirus. So you can relatively easily see what people are doing, by using branding like this.
If I were to expand this, I would move beyond just “.com” and search all top-level domains, as well as variants like “COVID” “SARS” and the like. We’d be curious to hear any other ideas for things you’d like to see. You can see the raw “.com” data below.
