The global market for Domain Names is expected to spike by 7.3% in the year 2020 supported by the fact that in the current COVID-19 times, a brand that doesn't have a digital presence has a near-zero chance of survival and identifying new opportunities. The market will continue to grow and will reach 597.5 million cumulative number of registered domain names by the year 2027, trailing a post COVID-19 CAGR of 6.7% over the analysis period 2020 through 2027. While the COVID-19 outbreak had a negative impact on businesses across diverse industries, it also led companies to adapt new strategies in line with the new normal. The over 58% growth in global IP traffic in 2020 reinforces the fact that COVID-19 is driving customers online for reasons obvious to all. This digital transformation is placing extreme pressure on products & brands to expand and strengthen their online presence. Amidst the crisis, companies are focusing their precious resources on evolving their digital marketing strategies. In addition to building websites, companies are focusing on improving site performance; shopping experience; and social media integration. Domains being real estate of the Internet, investments in this space are expected to spike. The domain industry has therefore exhibited relatively high degree of resilience to the pandemic, with sales and registrations of domain names maintaining the usual positive trajectory. The large increases in online traffic provide opportunities for companies to keep their target audience engaged through digital marketing initiatives. The pandemic was unable to seriously impact overall registrations for domain names, particularly for .com registrations. The total number of these registrations continued to increase in the recent months. The industry witnessed over 1.26 million registrations related to the .icu domain name in November 2019, representing 20% of overall .icu registrations.

While overall marketing spend declined due the pandemic-induced cuts in marketing and advertising budgets during the lockdown, available budgets are being directed at digital marketing initiatives. As a result, the pandemic is driving changes to digital marketing strategies at companies, especially at companies where digital marketing initiatives had relatively low priority. Companies are trying to assess the situation and adapt their messaging to create effective plans for businesses. Majority of players active in the space are overhauling their promotional messaging and delving on data for identifying and preparing for changes in their digital marketing strategies. In addition to assessing the effect of COVID-19 on domain registrations, companies are using search trends on Google along with evolving trends related to media consumption. The pandemic has resulted in a notable surge in search queries associated with domains, indicating inclination of people towards starting a blog or building websites for online business. The industry also witnessed peaks in new registrations for .store and .online domain names. Major changes in media consumption is being seen which is reflected by strong surge in digital engagement. Leading social media platforms registered huge popularity of messaging across countries hit hard by the pandemic. The trend can be attributed to travel restrictions and stay-at-home mandates along with high level of stress and customer desire for community support.

The scenario requires digital marketers to come up with appropriate strategies to assist clients and businesses in ensuring business continuity during the challenging times. While various companies have migrated to online platform for business continuity, they face issues in setting up and marketing. The situation requires businesses to ensure online presence and adapt to digital platforms. Going forwards, competition for domain names is expected to intensify as greater number of individuals vie to open up their own small businesses or startups and compete to procure their preferred domain name options. A peculiar trend observed during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis is the increased penchant for premium domain names. Because of COVID-19, there has been a visible and hurried shift to a digital-first economy and massive growth in the internet user base across the world with some regions showing growth as high as 70% during the first three quarters compared to same period in 2019. For businesses in general and premium and lifestyle brands in particular, domain names always play a crucial role in the online identity and such notion has become even more evident and visible amid the ongoing crisis. A growing number of luxury brands are leaning towards premium domains with the objective to define their authority and expertise in their industry and generate productive leads from search rankings. Premium domain names are simple, crisp, and descriptive and provide an exact-match with brand operations. Due to their unique design, premium domain names represent one of the best methods to rank high in online search results, which becomes critical for business in the prevailing complex online search scenario. Currently, there are more than 1.5 billion websites operational around the world, and over 70,000 search queries are raised every second, which makes it extremely difficult for brands and businesses to ensure their web sites rank high in online search. Premium domain names can resolve such problems related to online search rankings. Because of this reason, exact-match domain names such as Cars.com are priced as high as $850 million.