Apparently the non-news that David Beckham confirmed a move from Real Madrid to the American Major League Soccer team LA Galaxy ( football.guardian.co.uk ) has made some impact around the world, as Beckham has become quite a trademark over the years. According to The Daily Mail he can even end up owning his own Major Leage Soccer team at the end of the contract ( www.dailymail.co.uk )

Starting with the deal itself being exceptional in the context of American soccer, valued at nearly 50 million USD a year over five years, it also has effects for other sectors.

Domain registrations is one of them. The domain name davidbeckhamgalaxy.com got registered very quickly the 11th of January, by an american. A Brit later grabbed every combination of "beckham" and "galaxy" he could think of.

Being a domain registrar myself as well as having performed some COM analyses before this cought my interest too. Tthe latest in-depth look I had at the com zonefile was an analysis in April 2006 ( www.kfwebs.net ). So I went head and downloaded the COM zonefile as of 12th of January from the FTP server and loaded it into a DataBase Management System (DBMS).

In April 2006 there were 51,268,278 active COM domain names in the zonefile. Fast-forwarding untill the 21st of October 2006, there were 57,548,773 active COM domain names in the zone. As of 12th of january 2007 there were 61,693,685 active domain names in the zone. The number of active COM domain names have in other words increased by 20 per-cent in less than a year, 7 percent just since October.

Out of the domain names in the current zone, there are 79 domain names starting with "davidbeckam", including the davidbeckhamgalaxy mentioned earlier. 239 .com domain names starts with "beckham" and 652 domain names contains the same phrase somewhere in the name. Out of these, 16 domain names includes both the phrases "beckham" and "galaxy" at the same time.

Why, one can ask. Some of these sites are fan sites, created by enthusiastic individuals. But even more are registered by people, and oranizations, commonly referred to as domain squatters. They hope that someone will make a typo, or try to enter a domain name directly, and hence get their advertisement instead. The of the domains registered containing both phrases are:
+-----------------------+
| domain |
+-----------------------+
| BECKHAM-GALAXY |
| BECKHAMATGALAXY |
| BECKHAMGALAXY |
| BECKHAMGALAXYJERSEY |
| BECKHAMLAGALAXY |
| BECKHAMSGALAXY |
| BECKHAMSLAGALAXY |
| DAVIDBECKHAMGALAXY |
| DAVIDBECKHAMLAGALAXY |
| DAVIDBECKHAMSLAGALAXY |
| GALAXYBECKHAM |
| GALAXYDAVIDBECKHAM |
| LAGALAXY-BECKHAM |
| LAGALAXYBECKHAM |
| LAGALAXYDAVIDBECKHAM |
| THEBECKHAMGALAXY |
+-----------------------+

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