In the wake of the Sony hacking news and changes to  the premiere schedule and venue of the controversial movie, The Interview, I thought it would be interesting to see how many domain names were registered with the  keywords, “theinterview” and “Sony.” It often seems that people will registered domain names related to current events, despite the fact that trademark domain name ownership is risky.

I took a look at Verisign’s DomainView Keyword Trend tool to see what domain names were registered with certain keywords in the prior 30 days, and here is what I found:

There have been

According to an article written by Erin Griffith and published in Fortune, “[t]he latest trend in startup names is regular old human names.” The “human” brand names are becoming popular because they supposedly help to  “humanize the software they’re selling.” The author also discussed other startup branding and domain name trends that have occurred, including the trend to use a .LY or .SY domain name.

Most interestingly, the five startups that were cited in the article (Oscar, Alfred, Benny, Lulu, and Clara) don’t use exact match domain names for their websites. Instead, they use domain names that contain their name within the url.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see who owns the exact match .com domain name, and here’s what I found:

Last week, I wrote a blog post with some research I did to see what companies were doing well in Google rankings for Black Friday keywords. Now that Black Friday has passed and Cyber Monday is coming up soon, I thought I would do the same type of basic research to see what companies are ranking well in Google for Cyber Monday keywords.

Just as I did last time, the keyword searches below were done in Chrome using the incognito browser option so that my previous searches and web browsing history wouldn’t influence the results.  I did not include news articles or Adwords ad placements when searching, nor did I include things like images, videos, shopping… or other Google call-outs. If a website had more than one result in the top 3, I only counted it once.

Google results tend to be a bit fluid, so these results may have already changed since yesterday, and/or they may be different for people searching elsewhere. This isn’t scientific, but it is interesting to see what websites are ranking well for Cyber Monday general search results.

Here are the top 3 website rankings for Cyber Monday keywords that I found:

Now that Black Friday is here, I bet there are a lot of good domain industry deals to be had. I also presume there will be additional Cyber Monday deals and special offers from domain industry companies in a few days.

I invite you to share your coupon and promo codes, special offers, and other Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals found at domain industry companies so all of us can benefit. Many of us will receive emails with special offers and others will find discounts elsewhere.

Here are some ideas for discounts that would be of interest to me and probably people who read my blog: