Interesting Usage of X.CO

New Albion Sam Adams

I frequently see references to Go Daddy’s X.CO url shortener in various articles and elsewhere online. It’s not as popular as Bitly or T.CO shorteners that are more commonly used on Twitter, but I do see it somewhat regularly. However, I don’t recall seeing an X.CO reference offline, until I saw this Samuel Adams New Albion Ale beer bottle.

I have no idea where my brother bought this six pack, but he said it was a special beer. It tasted pretty unique, but I didn’t think all that much of it until i saw the secondary label on the back of the bottle directing people to X.CO/NewAlbion. When you visit the url, you’re taken to a website with a Samuel Adams logo and a video with information about the beer.

It’s an interesting choice of a url, especially because X.com is a functioning website, and obviously if you visit that particular webpage in a .com, it’s a 404 error. Although Overstock saw traffic leakage with O.CO, at least that traffic ended up visiting a non existent website.

Anyway, I found the Sam Adams / New Albion beer interesting, and I found the url choice even more interesting, and I wanted to share it with you.

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

13 COMMENTS

  1. Nice post, Elliot. They could have used bit.ly, but they chose to go with the shorter x.co. I, for one, own many ‘premium’ keywords like x.co/hotel and x.co/games and I have experienced decent traffic.

  2. Interesting find. For a large beer company, perhaps it was the doings of their ad or marketing agency, or maybe they just aren’t keenly aware of what “traffic leakage” is / does.

    What’s far more wasteful are the massive loads of expensive advertising traffic so many companies, large and small, direct to Facebook URL’s instead of their own brand’s website URL. You even see that in TV spots now. Crazy.

  3. The x.co shortener is case sensitive, it looks like they are aware of this as the took x.co/newalbion as well as x.co/NewAlbion, but if a person were to type it in as advertised (all capitalized) they wouldn’t go to Sam Adams. The capitalized version isn’t claimed.

    I don’t think many people would leave their caps lock on for it, but, it’s kind of funny that they are actually advertising a URL that doesn’t point to their site.

  4. USED:
    X.CO/NewAlbion (14 characters)
    .

    ALTERNATIVES:

    1) EXISTING COMPANY SITE:
    SamuelAdams.com/NewAlbion (25 characters)
    SamAdams.com/NewAlbion (22 characters)

    ~~ OR ~~

    2) STAND ALONE DOMAIN:

    2a) TAKEN:
    NewAlbion.com (+net,org,info,us)
    Albion.com (+net,org,info,us)
    NewAl.com (+net,org)
    NewAlb.com — registered: 2013-03-06**
    NewAlbionBeer.com — registered: 2012-07-06**

    **(suspiciously?) registered just prior to beer launch in Jan ’13

    .
    2b) AVAILABLE:
    AlbionBeer.com
    New-Albion.com
    NewAlbBeer.com
    NewAlbionAle.com***
    NewAlbionBrew.com
    NewAlbionBrewery.com

    ***article linked to from SamAdams.com calls it “New Albion Ale”:
    http://www.today.com/food/taste-history-old-school-beer-new-albion-gets-new-life-1C8099958
    .

    I think option 1 would have been a better choice (versus the x.co route they chose). If I had to select one of the available domains, I would have advised any of New-Albion.com, NewAlbionBrew.com, or NewAlbionAle.com.

    What do others think?

  5. Many moons ago, a wise old cleric at Ogilvy gave me a piece of advice I abide by to this day.

    The best advice you’ll ever get on campaign strategy, you’ll get from your mother (or grandmother, if you’re fortunate enough to still have one of those around)

    It’s so funny how the guys in the upstairs offices are paid to be simplifiers, while the ‘ambitious’ turds in the downstairs offices think they can ‘impress’ their superiors by creating Rube Goldberg machines or complex applications of ‘exciting, new technologies’.

    We aren’t Japan.

  6. It’s seems to me that x.co was used because it’s easier to type into a mobile browser. I often shorten with x.co when texting links to people.

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