Archive for the ‘.co’ Category
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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A big lift for .co this weekend as world’s largest registrar promotes .co to top of search box.
[Update: .com is now back as the default option. This was a test by GoDaddy.]
You might be in for a bit of a surprise if you visit GoDaddy today. This is what the search box looks like:
That’s right. The default search option is now .co at GoDaddy.
This is a huge win for .co since GoDaddy registers about half of all new domain names registered. It seems like a smart move for GoDaddy. Most domains people search for are taken in .com. So GoDaddy users are more likely to see their domain as “available”, not to mention .co domains cost about three times as much as .com domains to register.
I have no idea how long this change will last. Yet this isn’t the only good news for .co this weekend. Overstock.com, which recently featured o.co in a TV commercial, is getting ready to rebrand its international sites to o.co.
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Companies belatedly pursue .co domain names.
World Intellectual Property Organization has handed down its first two UDRP decisions for .co domain names since .co was relaunched over the summer.
In two separate decisions, WIPO panelists found in favor of the complainants for lafitness.co and tilda.co.
Twenty-one .co UDRP cases have been filed since August. In some cases the domain owner handed the domain name over voluntarily. For example, Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. filed a complaint for booz.co that was terminated after the domain name was transferred to the consulting firm.
Recently filed cases include CLS Rémy Cointreau going after Cointreau.co, Imperial Tobacco Canada Limited filing for imperialtobacco.co, and travel site Get Away Today.Com Inc. asking for getawaytoday.co. In each case the complainant owns the .com equivalent of the .co domain.
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.Co hits another big milestone.
Just a couple months after general release, the .co namespace has now registered over half a million domain names effective today.
37% of registrations are from within the United States, followed by 17% in the United Kingdom. 12% of domain names are registered in Colombia. .Co is the country code domain name for Colombia, but has been commercialized and liberalized.
Consumers and businesses have spent over $20 million registering .co domain names since the launch, including sunrise and landrush applications. About 2,500 domain names went to landrush auctions. Top sales include: Mesothelioma.co for $76,000; Insure.co for $60,000; DuiAttorney.co for $44,500; Slots.co for $41,000; Aspen.co for $22,500; Vehicles.co for $18,500, Sites.co for $15,500 and UsedCars.co for $14,000.
The launch period for .co has been an unequivocal success. It will be interesting to see how it fairs over the coming years.
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.Co trademark program concludes.
.Co announced today that 100% of the world’s top 100 brands have secured their .co domain name through the registry’s Specially Protected Marks Program, or “SPM.”
SPM provided a way for companies on the Deloitte Brand List to get their .co domains without the traditional expense and time required. Among the companies securing their .co domain through SPM are Facebook, Ferrari, Blackberry, Siemens, Sanyo, Amazon, Honda, GAP and Barbie.
The program is somewhat similar to the idea of having a “globally protected marks list” when new top level domain names launch. There is still a lot of debate around the idea, with much of the debate concerning which brands would actually make the list. You can imagine that brands listed 101-200 would push for an extended list.
What .co did was a win-win. It protected the rights of mark holders and won their praise. But .co can also now say that the world’s top 100 brands have secured their .co domain. That’s good publicity.
© DomainNameWire.com 2010.
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Trademark owners go after their names on .co.
A dozen companies have filed 13 .co domain name arbitration disputes since the relaunch of .co as a a generic domain name.
The most recent UDRP filing was for Dreamhost.co by the owner of the large web host DreamHost.com. This is a somewhat surprising case given that surely a web host was aware of the release of .co domains.
Other companies have also filed cases. AOL wants aolmail.co and L.A. Fitness is going after lafitness.co. Other companies filing complaints include:
Akbank Turk A.S.
Linode, LLC
Karl Storz GmbH & Co. KG
Barry’s Ticket Service, Inc.
Dormeuil Freres
Tilda Limited
Rautaruukki Oyj
Spa Esprit Group Franchise Pte Ltd
.Co domains are subject to a UDRP procedure similar to .com, except that only World Intellectual Property Organization currently hears the cases.
© DomainNameWire.com 2010.
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Big .co sale finally completed; landrush auctions begin.
e.Co, which was auctioned for $81,000 in a charity auction in June, has finally changed hands. Although the whois for the domain name still shows CO Internet, the buyer has informed me that the domain name was transferred to his registrar account today and that he paid for the domain weeks ago. It will be interesting to see what the buyers have planned.
In other .co news, the landrush auctions began today. Approximately 2,550 .co domain names that received more than one landrush application will be auctioned at Pool (information is available here). Landrush applicants have already plunked down about $300 per domain, and will now have to pay an additional amount if they wish to secure the domains.
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Another milestone. What’s next?
It has taken .co just two and a half weeks to hit a big milestone: today the .co domain name surpassed 400,000 domain name registrations according to the ticker on its web site.
Although the rate of registrations will obviously slow over time, this is a fantastic launch. Including roughly 39,000 domains that were charged a premium in the sunrise period and landrush (but excluding auction fees), I calculate that consumers have paid over $20 million for .co domain names so far.
According to HosterStats.com, the other recent country code rebrand .me had about 400,000 registrations in June of this year.
Where will .co go from here? Let’s do a little poll. How many domain names do you think will be registered at this time next year, which means .co will have gone through its first expiration deletion cycle?
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
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Relaunch was successful, but hard work remains.
It comes as little surprise to me, but it’s now apparent that the .co launch has been successful. As of now, 279,000 .co domain names have been registered. I calculate gross sales of about $19 million to date.
There are a number of reasons I’m not surprised by the initial success of .co. I outlined many of these in my last newsletter. But regardless of how or why it has charged out of the gate, and regardless of how much time, money, and ingenuity has gone into the process, it all starts over now. The long term viability of any top level domain name isn’t determined in the first week. It’s determined in the ensuing years.
The number one driver: use and promotion by end users.
.Co already has some big coups in this area. Twitter is using t.co. Overstock bought o.co, although it’s not sure what it will do with it. Go Daddy plans to use x.co.
But what will be interesting to watch is use by other companies. Will any of them actually use it for unique and new web sites? Will they advertise them on TV? Will small businesses say “find us at xyz.co”?
I can’t think of any “new” TLD that has been successful by this measure. Yes, .biz is a great business for Neustar. And .info is a cash cow for Afilias. But are they successful? Will they wilt under the pressure of hundreds of competing TLDs in the coming years?
Given the thought and money behind the launch, I know .co is thinking about this. The work has only just begun.
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Coming soon, x.co URL shortener.
Domain name registrar GoDaddy is releasing a new URL shortener at x.co, according to a tweet by company founder and CEO Bob Parsons:
This is likely a .co “founder’s program” deal. .Co has already done a deal with Twitter for t.co, which will be Twitter’s own URL shortener services. .Co is Colombia’s country code top level domain name, which is currently being liberalized.
The domain registrar is one of ten accredited registrars for .co domain names, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that it is upping the ante with registry .Co Internet.
Still, it will be interesting to see how GoDaddy positions the URL shortener. There are plenty of shorteners on the market, and Twitter will soon begin wrapping all links in t.co. It seems that the registrar will need to find a way to integrate the shortener into its other products to make it really gain traction. Many of the company’s employees currently use a .me shortener, and the .me registry is a partnership involving GoDaddy.
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