2 Year Anniversary .CO Infographic

In celebration of its second anniversary, the .CO Registry posted this neat infographic that I shared below. Here are some interesting facts about .CO from the infographic:

  • Over 1.3 million .CO domain names registered (predictions of massive drops appear unfounded.)
  • 54% of .CO names registered to US entities
  • There are 9 registered 1 letter domain names
  • 91% of LLLL.CO names unregistered
  • 81% of customers only own 1-2 .CO names
  • 24 accredited .CO domain registrars

Congratulations to the team at the .CO Registry on their continued success.  Here’s the infographic:

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

44 COMMENTS

  1. “1.3 million .CO domain names registered”

    Right. Registered but maybe not STILL registered.

    Is there an independent reporting entity that shows CURRENTLY registered .co domains?

    A fair question. Right?

    If there is no independent verification, we only know what we are told and that’s never a good thing.

    I would love to see the drop rate for July and the new registration rate for July.

    Lastly, I know a guy building a publicly traded company on a four letter acronym .co and he can buy the same four letter acronym in .com for $995 but he has not yet and I made it clear to him that he can buy it for $995 (I do not own, nor am I brokering the .com).

    So either he is nuts or I’m nuts.

  2. I think that infographic demonstrates the problems, the .co sites with the most traffic:

    t.co – a shortcut

    angel.co – some site talking about other startups

    Since this is an alternative extension, probably will take a hit, when all the new alternative extensions come along. It’s why you see a lot of .co fans dumping them now at places like Namepros.

  3. Seriously, go check out the .co thread. The biggest fans are now trying to sell them and not so high on them anymore. They realize the peak has already been reached, it’s nothing but downhill from here on out. One of the ways it was promoted was as an alternative extension, if you can’t get the .com, go for the .co. Now, if you can’t get the .com, get the….. your choice from a flood of alternative extensions. Obviously it’s going to take a hit, that’s just common sense.

  4. The most important statistic was 81% own only 1 or 2 .co’s. this means they have some 500,000 customers. I think that’s pretty good. If all their customers were domainers then that would be a big problem as in losing a domainer as a customer means losing a significant number of registrations.

  5. I think after this drop .co will have the same amount registration which had last year. For me its very visible that many people lost hope.
    Look at sedo, just sedo!, you have there 100,000 .co`s domains for sale and only few sold, often for pennies.
    At sedo.co you have many top .co none was sold and you even few bids made for the whole .co registry portfolio, I guess those bids even were made more for fun.
    .Co had good start but currently is going nowhere.
    Even .co official website did not have much updates for last months.

    I expect .co registry is going to make a good news to increase the renewal – like they did last year. So please be aware of that and look at many facts no on only one!

    Do you have .co`s?. what`s your net profit since you bought them?
    do not look at one sale but all portfolio profit. are you making money or you are loosing?. are you hoping that one day you…
    Wake up and do not fool yourself!

    • “Do you have .co`s?. what`s your net profit since you bought them?”

      @ Adam

      I have fewer than 5:

      Bahamas.CO
      Elliot.CO

      are two developed .CO domain names. Elliot.CO ranks in the top 10 for searches of my full name (Elliot Silver).

  6. @ Eliot
    It was just general question to people who have .co`s.
    I know you have only few as you mentioned it few times.
    Regards

  7. I love .co statistic which they just published.

    top countries
    1,3million .co registrations

    US 54%
    UK 11%
    COLOMBIA 8%
    AUSTRALIA 4%
    CANADA 3.5%
    GERMANY, INDIA, CHINA – 2% each

    Together 86,5% =1124500
    Left 13,5% = 175500

    .Co is registered in over 200 countries.
    So 175500 : 200 (there are more countries but I put just
    200) = 877.5 .co registrations in each country

    I have been living current in London, UK (11% .co registartions) and I have never come across .co ad and average guy never ever heard of .co unless s/he is domainer.

    I do not think anyone hear about .co in those over 200 countries except for 0,0000001 people.

  8. I own just a handful of 3L co’s, just stupid offers from time to time, I would take anything in the low 4 figure on at anytime, no big investment, but I do have quality letters… Not a fan, did not see the traffic flow, as I was hoping for, .co was bought out by domainers, and the .co registry is still holding many domains in their own inventory hoping high profile .com owners will come a knocking, don’t count on it.

    Last year I saw many of the drops get picked up, this year I wouldn’t expect that to be so, you will see a lot drop, with the high renewal cost, and what you can dropcatch for much less in a .com, or .net, forget about .co.

  9. To all the people who continue thinking gTLDs should not change anything here are the numbers and they are tremendous:

    Look these 1.3 million .CO domain names registered.
    These are 1.3 million times someone did not selected a .COM so hundred thousands of possible aftermarket sales lost!

    Imagine a minute the effect on the aftermarket when thousands of new extensions will arrive?

    It should be terrible!

    Move your domains, don’t hold stupidely all your domains like if all were gems!
    I made yesterday a blog post at Domainware.com that I think outlines how motionless can be negative for your business and domaining in general.

    In a side note: CONGRATS to the .CO team!

  10. It has been stuck at 1.3 million for months now. These stats are fictitious at best.

    With Calle investing in other new TLDs, it demonstrates a clear conflict of interest. And this is not diversification of an investment portfolio. The way they marketed .co as “changing the internet” now seems like a big joke.

    I agree with Francois. Never see your domains as “gems” and keep things in perspective.

  11. Congrats to the .CO team on their brilliant job with promoting the TLD. However this can be said only for the first year, as it can’t be ignored that, during the second one, the extension has been virtually abandoned.

  12. @ Francois You have made a very important observation. All these new TLDs launches may create confusion and help .com but they will definitely hurt the aftermarket.

    On low value .co sales, this is happening in all TLD’s not specific to .co . I picked up some real gem .net & org in x,xxx which would not have less than high xx,xxx

    I am not a very big fan of .co but it seems to be holding up pretty well . No need to be compared with .com which has been since eternity.

    It is that whole investment scenario worldwide is depressed in all asset classes like stocks / real-estate etc including domains

    BTW Not on on this topic @ Francois you were allowing Paypal Masspay but are avoiding it now. I think Masspay is very good feature & should not be dropped. It helps save some amount to domainers. Also u have started accepting Euro. How about some other currencies. :0

  13. This is an interresting article. I’m almost finished developing one of my dot COs. I build a professional looking Cloud Computing site on a dot co domain. Take a look at http://www.CloudComputing.co. This could bode well for other dot CO domains. Its notably interesting that Cloud.com, Cloud.co, CloudComputing.com domains are all being used as re-directs whereas CloudComputing.co has an actual site on it.

    Eric

  14. @ Goran

    We are working on a way that when you click “Reply” the comment starts with “in reply to” or something like that. For now, I am still using @ to address a person/comment.

  15. To bring another Londoner’s perspective, I have actually seen the use of .co around a few times – maybe not on tv but in printed media, online and even in a church sermon – so it has infiltrated the non-domainer market if only slightly. (I even saw another one last week on Kickstarter for some Tshirt-printing company)

    Firstly people said it would never take off, then there was meant to be a massive bubble, then the .COs were not going to be renewed! Now these havent happened, they are saying “I bet they will all drop this July”

    The problems the naysayers have is that whenever the statistics are produced they show what Elliot says – that they are unfounded.

  16. Short and sweet, the only thing .co had going for it, was to be a .com typo, this gives no indication of new gtld forecasts, it was overbought by the domaining community, and hyped to end users via superbowl, it is all smoke, and mirrors with .co.

  17. `Sedo just published a market report highlighting the performance of .CO domain names: https://www.domaininvesting.com/sedo-publishes-analysis-of-performance-of-co-domain-names-0611`

    This is exactly what I said yesterday (just look above) before their publishing.

    `I expect .co registry is going to make a good news to increase the renewal – like they did last year. So please be aware of that and look at many facts no on only one!`

    This is just play and to make you to renewal .co`s.
    This is just about money, millions. Juan said recently what he thinks about domainers. Give him a lesson!
    Pls look at facts, only facts! Do not make a fool of yourself.

    100,000 .co`s at sedo, almost none sold and .co registry was not able to sell any of their premium .co`s with sedo brokers help. I saw .co`s at sedo auction sold at 80-200usd with only one bid most of time.
    Real average .co price is 60-200usd.

  18. Hi everyone
    .co is just an internet infant so give it a chance (time) to grow.
    I have several .co’s parked at SEDO and what I’ve noticed recently is a rise of interest in them.
    I’ve already renewed my premium .co’s
    I think the NYT title “From .com To .co” may turn out to be a new domain reality someday as .co is the perfect alternative to .com
    Only wish Google’d go G.co

  19. @Elliot

    We all know end users are not going after .co in droves, renewal is speculators, I got XX amount into it, ok roll the dice for another year.

    This year you will see a lot more stuff drop, I would rather go with something brandable, than a straight generic .co if I was building out something new.

    • “We all know end users are not going after .co in droves, renewal is speculators”

      @ Ron

      I don’t have the evidence to say otherwise, but what evidence do you have? Frankly, we’re in a small industry and it would be impossible for anyone outside of the .CO management team to see who exactly is buying what. Even with that data, we wouldn’t know whether purchases/renewals are for defensive reasons, investments, or for future projects.

      This isn’t targeting you so don’t take it personal, but as someone who reads a lot about the domain industry, it’s bothersome to see people make blanket statements that are based on a small amount of available data.

      I don’t see many people using .US here in the US, but I wouldn’t make a statement saying that .US names are only owned by speculators. It could be true, but it’s just a guess based on relatively nothing, which renders it basically worthless.

      Again, no offense to you because I am sure I’ve done it and plenty of other people do it, too.

  20. “These are 1.3 million times someone did not selected a .COM so hundred thousands of possible aftermarket sales lost!”

    This is just a dumb comment. Most of those are just domainer speculation, nothing else.

    Take a real good look at that infographic, it’s not exactly showing .co in a good light, lets go thru some.

    1 letter domains – basically nothing but redirects to a .com and of course o.co, which got a lot of publicity when they went with a .co, then it failed.

    100% of 3 letters registered – And you can go to Namepros and see some starting at auction for a whopping $1, usually can pick them up under $20.

    91% of 4 letters still unregistered – haha, why would you put that in an infographic? That tells me the market is very weak.

    Already went thru the ones with the most traffic above.

    Superbowl ads, that’s nothing but GoDaddy picking the extension they can make the most money with. It could be any other new extension with that price, they would have made commercials for that.

    10,000 startups getting free .co, I guess you have to give them away, and I’ve probably not heard of even 1 of them.

  21. There are developed .COs popping up that aren’t shorteners or low-level minisites. I’ve run across several German companies using the extension (yes, really), a few Spanish language sports news sites, and recently, Brit.co, which is a really well designed style site owned by Brit Media.

    None of these sites have the visibility of O.co, but it says something that readers are navigating to them everyday and participating in discussions. It would be interesting to know if there was any drop-off (or gain) in traffic after rebranding to the .CO, if they came from a different extension.

    Yes, I know it doesn’t matter until there are thousands of .CO sites with greater visibility, and I’m sure that will ever happen…but they do exist.

  22. When I type in brit.co into Google I get – Did you mean: brit.com

    It is what is, something it can never escape. The extension is the closet to .com, therefore the leakiest extension out there to .com.

    Many people will learn the hard way, if they had commons sense to begin with, they would have made better decisions from the onset. You don’t build on a leak.

  23. @Elliot

    “so what is driving the renewel rate?”

    The default auto-renew function at most registries (especially godaddy).

    How much better does it get? Lottery tickets that are automatically renewed…

  24. @Sem
    I switched my GoDaddy auto-renew function off long time ago so my decision to renew my .co’s was in no way coincidental as I see a great future for .co once people learn to distinguish .co which is just a matter of time.
    However i did not renew all of my .co’s.
    By the way Has anyone seen or heard of any .co renewal discount codes?
    have a great weekend

  25. @Jacek
    Man You learn nothing for a whole year!
    One year ago you submitted all yr .co portfolio here and Shane told you was gambling.
    You do not have any .co domain which can be called premium.
    Instead of wasting yr money go to person who understand market pay him and get honest reply about your domains. You really save a lot of money doing this.

  26. @Adam

    How do You know what .co’s does my domain portfolio consist of??

    If, for example, Professional.co is not a premium .co domain, what is?

    give me a break (frankly I am fed up with your .co negativity)

    ps. Has anyone come across any .co renewal discount codes yet?

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