Are Domains With Hyphens Making a Break?

Lately I’ve noticed that more and more high profile organizations and individuals are using hyphenated domains as a primary website. Here are some examples:

Chicago-Fire.com – the official website of the Chicago MLS team. ChicagoFire.com is a different website.

Bastian-Schweinsteiger.de – Former player of the German national team and winner of FIFA World Cup. Currently playing for Chicago Fire.

I also notice that in Germany especially, a lot of companies use the .de TLD with names that include a dash.

Key-systems.de is another German-based Internet company that now forwards to key-systems.net, likely to become a more global company. They don’t own keysystems.com or keysystems.net.

Mario-Goetze.com – like Bastian, he also played on the World Cup winning Germany team.

I’ve seen a lot more but can’t remember right now. As I find them I will update this post.

Update:

Gatekeeper-systems.com – security systems company that does not own gatekeepersystems.com (owned by a separate company).