Good Week for Dot CO

It’s been a pretty good week for the .CO Registry and companies that are betting on the success of .CO domain names.

The first bit of great news came in the form of a tweet from Juan Diego Calle, CEO of .CO Internet S.A.S, the company that operates the .CO Registry. Yesterday, Calle announced that there are now 1.5 million .CO domain names registered. 1.5 million domain names registered is no joke, and it’s certainly better than most naysayers would believe.

If you read TechCrunch daily, you probably know the second bit of good news. Five start up companies that use .CO domain names for their brands have been featured on TechCrunch in the previous several days. Mailstrom.CO,  Fosbury.CO,  Simpler.CO, Vine.CO,  ShopInterest.CO, and Angel.CO  have all been written about or discussed on TechCrunch since Sunday. I briefly looked, and aside from .com, no other domain extension has had more mentions than .CO.

The .CO Registry hasn’t rested on its laurels one bit since launching a few years ago. The company sponsors a wide variety of conferences and meetups in the tech space, and they treat founders and management of .CO-using companies very well. .The .CO Registry truly understands that .CO is much more of a brand than a ccTLD, and they market it in that manner.

I know that some domain investors would like to see larger and more frequently reported .CO domain sales, but just as importantly, the .CO brand is popular among startups and others looking for a .com alternative. This demand will help increase values, and I am sure owners of top quality .CO domain names receive offers for their names. Sure, they might not see 6 figure offers as they might if they owned the matching .com, but they certainly didn’t pay the same amount they would have paid for the matching .com.

Congratulations to the .CO Registry for hitting another big milestone. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them hit 2 million registrations after next year’s .CO focused Super Bowl commercial.

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

18 COMMENTS

  1. “1.5 million domain names registered is no joke, and it’s certainly better than most naysayers would believe.”

    And when the new extensions start rolling out, those numbers will level off and then start to fall. Most of them are held by domainers and instead of renewing, will take that money and try it out at other table.

    • People forget .CO holds A LOT of value among us COLORADOANS! We love the .CO extension here! It’s easy to have your digital .com and forward that over to your offline marketing easy to remember .co domain – We surprisingly don’t see a lot of bounce traffic from the .com (which we also own) Thought it would be around 30% traffic loss, but really it’s more along the lines of 3% and those people seem to catch-on that the .com is not us!

    • I’m in Colorado and swooped up 420.co, thc.co, and mmj.co for the marijuana craze here. I was first offered $500 for 420.co in 2011. In 2013 I was offered $20,000 for thc.co. I’m holding out as I think all 3 are worth at least $1,000,00.00

  2. When the Tonite Show goes to NY, Burbank will be a ghost town.

    How convenient, the dot co banner is on top of the website. should we say, the article is sponsored by dot co.

    • Regarding Burbank: LOL… I don’t think so.

      Regarding .CO: They are an advertiser obviously, and I think they’re doing better than most people would have guess three years ago.

    • If the democrats can’t turn southern california into a ghost town, I don’t think a little show moving could. Plenty had already left. But, the weather are just too alluring for most of us to leave be it from Burbank or the High desert.

  3. R. E. = ” The first bit of great news came in the form of a tweet from Juan Diego Calle, CEO of .CO Internet S.A.S, the company that operates the .CO Registry. Yesterday, Calle announced that there are now 1.5 million .CO domain names registered. 1.5 million domain names registered is no joke, and it’s certainly better than most naysayers would believe. ”

    Yes good Ole Juan Calle, he sold out all the small businessmen in columbia to others offshore. All these would be Small Businesses in his own country have nothing but pigeon shit to build out their businesses on in their own country TLD. Yes Juan Calle is his countrymens hero???

    You think this is cool Elliot? Shamefull!

    Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)

    • Actually Jeff…. The nice thing about .CO with regards to Columbia is that it’s now a revenue generator for the country’s IT sector. Every reg you do on .CO helps to fund govn’t programs and such – unlike gTLDs, in which you’re just adding to ICANNs coffers. So yes, Juan Calle IS in fact his countrymens hero 🙂

    • Sigh.
      Jeff, you’re just piss and wind. Everyone here knows it. Why don’t you do everyone a favour and take your incorrect opinions that seem to be bankrupt of any form of research or knowledge somewhere else.
      There’s enough uneducated speculative tools on the internet already bud.
      Cheers.

  4. Great to see fresh success in the domain world. .CO will be a safe harbor in what is certainly going to be price deflation in the industry.

  5. I think it’s great .co is having so much success. Even as a ccTLD, I agree with its marketers, it is completely memorable and brand able. What does co usually stand for and what is the first thing that comes to mind when hearing it? It usually stands for Company or Corporation, and that is what is what comes to mind for the majority of people, unless you are a domainer and know it’s a Columbian country code. At the end of the day It’s a great extension amd can be used for both. It’s easily understandable why this extension is gaining the ground it is.

    Jason

    • These are two slightly different things, There is actually .co the ccTLD (gTLD, now in Google’s eyes) and the “second-level domain” .CO.XX as you referenced .co.uk, .co.nz, etc.

      .CO as the cc/gTLD is owned by SOS Registry – Columbia and sold via Go.Co, which brings in and generates large amounts of revenue for the Columbian PEOPLE, which receive this revenue.

      .CO = Community, Culture and Colorado! ;()

  6. I think this is impossible to find a dot com domain even they are not in use . so dot co extension is good for us and i have site .co extension and its great for seo also , you can target to any geographic region.

    i consider .co is a good one.

  7. I am actually going back and forth with a startup looking to buy one of my .co domains – I do believe that all the marketing the .co registry has done and is still doing has helped the industry as a whole – So congrats to .co on 1.5!

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