Trump’s domain portfolio: Defensive registrations or future ventures?

Neither a president nor any other foreign leader has ever created vortexes in the Domain industry as U.S. President, Donald Trump has.

Over the course of the last year, the term “Trump” was the most popular terms in .com domains (# 2 in .net domains), according to Verisign’s 2016 year-end report. And just a year later, President Trump caused internet upheaval again when one of his tweets contained the typo "covfefe".

 

Quickly after the tweet was posted, many domain variants were registered around this wildly confusing term including covfefe.de, covfefe.country, covfefe.pink, covfefe.review or covfefe.vision. Even typo versions like cofveve.com and cofveve.de have already been registered. It’s still unknown what the owners of these addresses have in mind – one possibility is selling them – but it is questionable who would buy these domains.
 

It is clear the Trump organization has built up an extensive domain portfolio around Donald Trump both the businessman and the prominent yet sometimes polarizing political figure. According to a report by Politico, a popular online magazine for political culture, the organization has renewed or reclaimed hundreds of domain names.

 

At this time it’s difficult to determine whether the names in the portfolio have been registered for purely defensive reasons, or whether concrete business plans will be implemented using these domains. However, one thing is certain: the organization has been thorough in securing all variants of playwithdonald.com to trumpvodkasucks.com. And though the inauguration has passed, the registrations have not stopped.

 

A detailed view of the portfolio can be found directly at Politico.