Archive for the ‘.co’ Category
.Co to be featured in GoDaddy Super Bowl commercial.
The .co top level domain name will get heavy exposure at the Super Bowl for a second year in a row.
Today domain name registrar GoDaddy announced that one of its two commercials in next year’s Super Bowl will feature .co.
Last year’s .co/GoDaddy commercial tempted viewers to visit GoDaddy.com to find out who the new .co girl was. Despite the young Tabitha Taylor’s body in the commercial, the .co girl turned out to be Joan Rivers.
The domain registrar said last year’s .co commercial sparked a record jump in domain registrations for the company — 466% within 15 minutes.
Go Daddy Girls Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels will return for this year’s commercials, which Go Daddy says have already been approved by NBC’s “Standards and Practices” division.
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Related posts:
- “It Would Take a Super Bowl Commercial for a New TLD to Stick”
- GoDaddy.com Purchases Second Super Bowl Commercial
- GoDaddy to Advertise in 2010 Super Bowl
Champagne.co becomes first .co domain name case won by respondent.
A complainant has finally lost a UDRP case for a .co domain name.
Comite Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne has lost the case it brought for the domain name Champagne.co.
The decision text hasn’t been posted yet, but this is the first time a complainant has lost a .co complaint at World Intellectual Property Forum since .co was liberalized last year. I’m not sure about National Arbitration Forum since it doesn’t break out cases by top level domain.
The complainant owns Champagne.com, which is forwards to Champagne.fr (unless you don’t type in www, in which case it goes to an Apache test page).
A saving grace for the domain owner may be that the domain didn’t resolve, so it didn’t point to ad links for Champagne (the drink). However, the whois stated the organization was “DotCo Investments”. My guess is this case hinges on Champagne being a location or geo domain.
Update: WIPO has posted the decision, and it’s more interesting than I thought. It seems that the panel questioned the complainant’s rights to the “champagne” mark. The respondent admitted he registered the domain name for the alcohol connotation, but said he didn’t think it was a trademark. The complainant tried to withdraw the case at the last minute, but the panelist declined. Ultimately, he ruled the complainant failed to show the domain is confusingly similar to a mark in which it has rights.
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Related posts:
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- Peruvian Broadcaster Loses Case for RPP.com
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Data shows that bulk of domain registrations are not from domainers.
Are domain investors or individual site owners and end users driving most of the .co domain registrations?
I just got some data from the .co registry that suggests it’s the latter.
Registrants with 50 or more .co domain names comprise only 1% of the total registrant base. What’s more, these people only account for about 10% of all domain names registered.
That means people with fewer than 50 .co domains make up 90% of the total registration base.
If you define people with 10 or more domains as “domain investors”, the number goes up slightly. About 2% of .co registrants have 10 or more domains, and the total of their portfolios is about 17.5% of all domains registered. This percentage is dropping every month.
So over 80% of .co registrations are coming from people with fewer than ten .co registrations. Most have just one or two .co domains. I suspect some of the heavily domainer-invested extension are opposite of these numbers for .co.
For the record, I own one .co domain name — DNW.co.
In other interesting .co news, .Co Internet was recently nominated for a World Trademark Review Industry Award.
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- As New Domain Registrations Fall, Domain Registrars Get Desperate
- .Tel Tops 100,000 Registrations
Second premium liquor keyword in .co sells in as many weeks.
Sedo has brokered the sale of Vodka.com for $10,000 to the same person who bought Tequila.co for $14,500 just a week ago.
Of course Vodka.com was one of the most expensive domain names ever sold. Legendary domainer Roy Messer sold it to a Russian vodka company for $3 million.
So who’s the mystery buyer snapping up these liquor domains?
No, it’s not a liquor company. It’s someone in the Czech Republic who has a penchant for high quality keyword .co domain names. The same person owns both Auctions.co and Beauty.co. He also owns some generic keywords in .asia.
The seller of the two liquor domains is someone in Bogota, Colombia, who likely got the domain names through the grandfathering process when .co was opened up at the second level.
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Related posts:
- Vodka.com sells for $3M
- OfficeSupply.com sells for 6-figures
- Domain Names as a Competitive Advantage
Two largest UDRP administrators now handling .co domain name disputes.
[Update: Apparently NAF started offering .co disputes last fall. This is the first time I've seen a .co dispute there.] National Arbitration Forum has joined World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in offering dispute resolution services for .co domain name.
When .co relaunched last year the only authorized UDRP provider was WIPO.
Some companies were behind the ball and didn’t get their domain names during the trademark sunrise period. The easiest resolution for many of them is to file a UDRP.
So far WIPO has received 70 .com disputes from companies such as AOL, Revlon, Brookstone, and Adidas. Complainants have yet to lose a case.
National Arbitration Forum does not offer searching by top level domain, but I believe the first case was BackCountry.co, which commenced on March 3.
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Article highlights commercialization of two letter country code domains.
The New York Times published an article today about the commercialization of country code top level domain names.
Colombia’s .co will get major attention after a Go Daddy commercial plugs it today, and .co was front and center in the article.
.Co Internet CEO Juan Calle noted that Colombia gets 25% of revenue from sales of .co. This is the first time I’ve seen this number published.
.Co grossed $20 million last year thanks to higher prices for sunrise and premium domain names. Calle thinks the number will be $30 million this year. He hope to hit five million .co domain names within five years, according to the article.
Last month I somewhat humorously suggested that the new “south Sudan” could name itself for domain name profits. I was a bit surprised to get a note from someone working on the renaming the next week asking for my opinion.
Other popular commercialized ccTLDs include .tv (Tuvalu) and .me (Montenegro).
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- New York Times article on Oversee.net
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Go Daddy says it will unveil GoDaddy.co girl in conjunction with Super Bowl commercial.
.Co already scored a major coup by partnering with Go Daddy on its 2011 Super Bowl commercial. But the publicity train rolls on.
The latest announcement from Go Daddy: it will showcase its first every GoDaddy.co girl in the commercial.
Well, maybe. The company hasn’t decided it if will formally unveil the .co girl during the broadcast commerical or make viewers go to the the online extended version of the commercial to find out who it is. (Go Daddy typically has a “see more at GoDaddy.com” message at the conclusion of its commercials as a busty women starts to take off her clothes.)
In the press release, .Co Internet S.A.S. CEO Juan Diego Calle says “Cool domain names, long gone in the dotCOM sphere, are available now with dotCO…We think the new Go Daddy dotCO Girl will bring dotCO to the mainstream — it’s a memorable, meaningful domain name extension destined to open up millions of new, creative branding opportunities on the Internet.”
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Related posts:
- Go Daddy Gets Jillian Michaels as New Go Daddy Girl
- “It Would Take a Super Bowl Commercial for a New TLD to Stick”
- NBC Approves Two Go Daddy Ads for Super Bowl
Big registrars pushing .co as next best thing to .com.
Last month Go Daddy created quite a buzz by briefly changed its default domain name search parameter to .co.
Although Go Daddy and its competitors continue to offer .com first, two large retail domain registrars are making a significant push to get customers to register .co.
Both Network Solutions and Register.com are promoting .com as a second choice to .co, with Network Solutions even promoting .co above other domain extensions you’ve selected.
Here’s a screenshot from Network Solutions. I searched for xyzdomain and selected the default .com and .net TLDs. .Com is unavailable, but Network Solutions slots (and auto selects) .co along with .net, even placing it ahead of the available .net.
If the .com is available, Network Solutions still slots .co as number two but doesn’t auto select it.
At Register.com .co is called out as an alternative whenever your .com isn’t available. The site pitches the domain as an alternative to .com, saying .co is short for “company”. Alternative TLDs are far down the page:
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Benefit of the doubt given to complainants in .co cases.
Companies have filed 51 UDRPs against .co domain names since the relaunch of .co into an international domain name extension over the summer. They haven’t lost yet.
Complainants are 25-0 in cases that have been decided, and further settled seven cases prior to having them heard by World Intellectual Property Organization panelists.
In most cases the domain at issue is an exact match to a famous brand such as aolmail.co and cointreau.co. But the benefit of the doubt is afforded to complainants, such as in the case of TGV.co. The complainant merely pointed to a parked page offering the three letter domain name for sale as evidence. And the respondent in HGTV.co didn’t even bother to respond.
If you registered a generic or acronym .co domain name for good intentions, be sure you aren’t parking it. It’s an easy way to lose the domain name.
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Related posts:
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- DNW Certified Stats Now Compatible with SmartName
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by Kevin Murphy
Go Daddy’s 2011 Super Bowl ad is going to have one big difference – it will advertise .co domains.
The registrar has made a deal with .CO Internet to share the cost of the big-money ad – exact terms have not been disclosed – in what will be the biggest marketing deal for .co to date.
The news broke last night at a rooftop party held by the .co registry in Cartagena, Colombia, following the first day of the ICANN public meeting here.
Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons made an appearance at the party, albeit only in a pre-recorded video, to drop massive hints that a big Super Bowl-related deal was in the works.
On-site sources subsequently confirmed that the two companies have arranged to jointly advertise during the annual sporting event.
The announcement was followed by a fireworks display that lasted almost ten minutes, which might give you an idea of how important it is for .CO Internet.
The news is huge for .co’s legitimacy as a pseudo-gTLD, and will almost certainly lead to a big up-tick in domain registrations for the company.
Go Daddy’s annual Super Bowl commercials are one of the big reasons for the company’s success, and for the mainstream success of the domain name industry.
Kevin Murphy is a freelance journalist and author of Domain Incite. He will be reporting for Domain Name Wire from the ICANN meeting this week in Cartagena, Colombia.
© DomainNameWire.com 2010.
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Related posts:
- GoDaddy to Advertise in 2010 Super Bowl
- NBC Approves Two Go Daddy Ads for Super Bowl
- GoDaddy.com Purchases Second Super Bowl Commercial
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