“A study conducted by CENTR in April 2020 looked at newly registered domains of 12 ccTLDs between January and March 2020. The ccTLDs reported a total of combined 6154 domains which contained the term covid, corona and/or virus. To put this figure into perspective, the same set of ccTLDs recorded a total over 751K newly registered domains in the same 3-month period. The covid related domains therefore represent just 0.8%. A web crawler scanned the impacted domains finding roughly 26% had some sort of active website. The study shows a couple of things – firstly that the appetite for covid themed domains appears small in ccTLDs and secondly that it does not likely explain the overall boost in new domains.”..
