Dot Sauce

Millions in Virtual Real Estate to be Created Overnight During .CO Launch

The .CO landrush has come to an end and it has been a spectacular event. In just a few hours, the .CO registry will open to the public for general availability registrations.

There have been over 40,000 pre-registrations during the landrush period and a lot of media coverage both within and outside the domain industry.

General Availability

Update: The registry is now public! Remaining .CO domains will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis. GoDaddy has .CO for $29.99 per year.

CoInternet is now reporting over 215,000 registrations so far.

Thousands more domains will be claimed during the general availability today and in the coming days, weeks and months.

Combining todays’ expected registrations and premium domains awarded for landrush applications should easily total several million dollars in estimated value.

Notable .CO Domains

O.co – Sold for $350,000 to Overstock

E.co – Sold for $81,000 at charity auction

T.co – New short URL for Twitter (likely to be implemented today)

Disrupt.co – TechCrunch startup event

Duck.co – DuckDuckGo Search Community

.Co Founders Program – Many businesses and individuals awarded free .co domains under contract to actively develop for at least 2 years. You will begin seeing many launch announcements on .co domains soon.

3 Things I Like About .CO

• It rides on the coat tails of .COM in representing commerce and companies.
• Registry operator CoInternet is doing a phenomenal job marketing the launch and will likely continue to do so.
• Early adoption by big players such as Twitter

3 Things I’m Concerned About

• Will people have a problem recognizing a .CO domain when spoken verbally? We are so used to hearing .COM
• Over speculation within the industry may cause public outcry against domaining and tarnish .CO similarly to .US
• Owners will fool themselves into believing their keyword .CO domain is worth just as much as it’s .COM counterpart.

What do you think of .CO? Please leave your comments below or send me a message on Twitter @DotSauce.

Want to know more about the domain industry or how to get started buying and selling? Ask a question on the all new DotSauce Q&A forum.

This article is from DotSauce Magazine.

Tags: ccTLD, Current Events, Domain Industry, Registrars, TLDs