Barack Obama's choice of Joe Biden as running mate for the US presidency has sparked off a wave of domain name registrations.
ObamaBiden.org on eBay with a hundred thousand dollar starting price.
Just out of curiosity, we wanted to see if the traditional wave of opportunistic registrations that follow major announcements or events has materialized around the Obama-Biden bid for the White House.
.ORG leads .NET and .COM
Sure enough, our search for domains containing the terms "obama" and "biden" yielded fascinating results. We chose to limit ourselves to America's three most popular domains, .COM,.NET and .ORG, but still came up with around 200 names. We were surprised to see .ORG as the most popular choice with 99 registrations at the time of our search, compared to 65 .NETs and only 32 .COMs.
Maybe speculators prefer to steer clear of a .COM they consider as too high profile for such names, while genuine registrants, i.e. those with a clear political agenda, feel .ORG is more effective…
Auctions
Who are the people registering these names? Often, they are domain speculators. Several names lead to parking pages but some take you straight to an eBay auction page. The starting bid for 08obamabiden.net is a very reasonable $0,99 but the owner of obamabiden.org has gone for a more ambitious $100 000.
But some names are registered for darker purposes. Type electobamabiden.com and you'd expect a pro Obama-Biden site. Instead, you will be taken to a GOP website! Republicans trying to trick Democrat supporters by registering pro-Democrat domain names? Ouch!
• Search engine We used domain registrar INDOM's search engine to find the domain names we were after. Their system will except several search terms and can be run on several extensions beyond .COM, .NET and .ORG. The first 10 results for each suffix are even shown free online. Try it by clicking on the link in the title.
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