The .co Domain Registry Gaining in Popularity
The number of .co domains is growing.
About 600,000 .co domains have been registered after nearly four months of availability. While that is paltry compared with some 90 million .com addresses spoken for already, the new domain is proving to be popular with startup entrepreneurs.
One San Francisco-based entrepreneur, who’s starting a travel-related site and is pitching angel investors to raise capital, told me that the .com domain she wanted was already taken. The domain owners wanted $80,000 to sell it to her.
“I’m in the middle of starting VC and angel funding pitches and including $80,000 in the financial plan looks ridiculous,” she told me.
So the budding online travel entrepreneur bought the .co version of her company name instead.
“The new domain has an edge to it that .com doesn’t,” she says. “It looks sexier and cooler, and it’s a lot cheaper than haggling for an existing .com domain.”
Naval Ravikant, an angel investor and an early investor in Twitter, says that the registry is here to stay. Ravikant says he encourages all startups to register using the .co domain. And he recommended to Twitter that it register the t.co domain for its URL shortening service.
“All of the good .coms are gone,” Naval told me. “Even the short misspellings are running out. It’s not unusual to see a raw startup with $250,000 or $500,000 in funding having to shell out $25,000 to $100,000 for a serviceable .com domain name.”
As I previously reported, to keep squatters from gobbling up prized domains, Miami-based .CO Internet S.A.S., the registry operator for the .co domain that rolled out July 20 as a replacement URL for .com, is doing its best to legitimize registrants of well-known trademarks and company names.
Also, .CO Internet has recently sold certain domains (such as vehicles.co, shipping.co and signs.co, among others) through auction. Of course, that’s bad news for some who want to be the next Gary Kremen, the entrepreneur who started the dating site Match.com and bought the rights to several .com domains in the early days of the Internet, including sex.com, which he later sold for a reported $12 million.
“Every domain launch in history has been focused on by domain investors,” says Lori Anne Wardi, director of .CO Internet. “But we’re pricing the .co domain high so the person with the greatest use would buy it or win it in auction.”
On Monday afternoon, .CO Internet announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that the highly coveted single-letter domain name, i.co will soon be put on the auction block.
“As one of the shortest possible URLs in the world, and featuring the most popular single letter in the alphabet, the i.co domain is likely to be one of the most valuable pieces of online real estate ever available,” said Juan Diego Calle, CEO and co-founder of .CO Internet in a prepared release.
No doubt, i.co will sell for big bucks. And I expect more entrepreneurs, as they are exposed to the .co domain, will clamor for new registrations because there are fewer and fewer .com names left.
Related posts:
CJ Donovan said on November 16, 2010
In the early days of our business, we had to invest 5 figures for our primary .com domain. In truth, it was lucky we did so then because now it would go for much, much more.
While that investment in our ideal, short .com name has paid off dozens of times over, I’d always wished we’d grabbed more relevant keyword-oriented domain names before they had all been eaten up by competitors and domainers.
With this summer’s .CO launch, we made sure to grab a handful of memorable niche keyword .CO domain names for our business and we couldn’t be happier. These are names that have been reserved in .com/.net/.org/.whatever for years and now we can leverage the .CO versions to market our vertical offerings. We are currently developing mini-sites which will be helpful to users, provide us with a new lead generation source and also further our brand.
The time to get a .CO domain at a reasonable price (registration fee or a low aftermarket price) could be now, before the extension matures and becomes the accepted alternative to King .com.
Mahdad said on November 16, 2010
I think this whole .co sale is yet another ploy by the registrars to make a buck, just like .me. They try to create hype around it all to sell off domain names and create these mini gold rushes. Consumers get excited, duped and impulsive hoping to buy the next business.com but end up with my-business.co wondering why they can’t sell it or clueless of how to build it.
Some entrepreneurs of course do make money selling to the next entrepreneur or speculator, probably the same guy who buys $10MM artwork and drives the price up simply because he has money to play with rather than doing something more useful for the world with it.
Companies and brands get distracted from actually building a quality reputation and instead end up buying dozens of keyword rich sites to create microsites going after the long tail. Like Mr. Donovan. What about search? How will they even compete with the myriad of .coms and whatever else that are already competing for the top spots on search results? Soon we’re going to have search engines specific to different domain levels too!
The rest of the money just goes into the registrars’ pockets who sit there twiddling their thumbs. 600,000+ .co names and counting already sold for $10-$30 and it’s an easy few million. And then they are put up for auction by the registrars or their friends at Sedo or GreatDomains to find the highest bidder who is probably some manic on a high spending money he doesn’t have. More money for the registrars and co.
Registrars weave a story that .co and .me will be the next big thing. Why should it? Why is .co any different than .so or .yo or .mo? Does it take us any longer to type it? Just because “Co” could stand for COmmunity, COmmerce or COoperation? Please.
Almost every single person I know at some point has bought a domain name because they get suckered into GoDaddy and Register.com marketing. One day in 100 years time the internet is going to have domain names that use : or * instead of . Next year .no or .yes will be the fad. Maybe it will be .go or .now
Value only increases if resources are finite and the domain universe and their creative registrars seem to be on an infinite path. I guess that is the nature of the universe and humans as we continues explore, create and claim our lands.
How about .go%#$&yourselves registrars. Is that for .sale?
David Laurent Guffroy said on November 19, 2010
What does this new extension mean? Simply, beyond the speculation, it means that people want to be unique. They all want their web site, their own space web. My space, my yahoo, my picks etc… make sense.
Soon everyone will have his own domain. It’s already your address.It will be your phone number and finally it will be your own identity, even a part of personality.
No one can stop this trend. Internet is in fact just the beginning of the new planetary civilization. Everything will go trough. Everything.
Internet network, social network grow so fast that anything we have known. It’s a world melting pot and new world culture.
Alastair Goldfisher said on November 22, 2010
Thanks, everyone, for your comments. I can’t respond to all the points made here, but let me just say to Mahad that I don’t know anyone who was suckered into buying a domain name because of the GoDaddy and Register.com marketing efforts. Apart from the registrar that you criticize, I hear from entrepreneurs and investors who have told me, endlessly, the importance of this new domain for their startups and they are thankful for how .CO Internet is going about managing the process. That kind of testimonial, from folks whose business depends on the domain experience, can not be denied.