I'll start off with a disclaimer. I'm equally invested into .CO and .COM so that will definitely increase my chances of choice-supportive bias - or at least some type of post-purchase cognitive bias that prevents me from being completely neutral.
There are valid points on both sides of the argument. For me:
The downsides of .CO
- Yes, some traffic loss. If you have the money, .COM is king, I'll be the first to agree to that.
- Renewal fees! (Although, I think this keeps the extension clean and prevents usage for spam / bots)
- As a domainer, they're never going to command the same money as .COM
- For the reasons above, it's not a domainer-friendly extension - it's expensive to keep and not the easiest to sell!
The advantages of .CO
- It's possible to pick up some great keywords for a fraction of their .COM equivalent.
- A good one-word .CO can still be bought for $XX and sell for 4-figures+
- I feel like things have moved on somewhat since 2010. I don't see as much confusion between .COM and .CO (although some will always remain).
- Many countries are familiar with using .CO.** as part of their cctld - .CO.uk, .CO.jp, .CO.kr, .CO.za etc - there's a potential upgrade path here for when the straight-swap .COM is unobtainable.
- There is also an upgrade path for end-users coming off longer .COM or hyphenated-COMs - both of which will already experience traffic loss and misspells (impacting email and traffic)
- I personally, like short and snappy domains for business brands. The trade-off with a long .com is that people have to remember extra words. I'd rather have word.co than wordwordword.com where the additional words are unnecessary. The extra variable to remember just alternates to the other side of the dot (the extension).
- The letters CO have represented the word 'Company' for hundreds of years before COM. There are vast quantities of brands that end in '& Co' or 'Co'.
Regardless of extension:
- Poor quality domains will still be poor quality domains, no matter how long you hold them
- Renewing domains without any type of strategy increases portfolio maintenance costs, eating into profits.
- Not knowing how to find potential prospects limits ability to research and invest in 'end-user' quality domains
- Once you can identify prospects, not having confidence to do outbound sales limits you to awaiting inbound enquiries and/or assuming that nobody wants them.
- Buying domains without any end-users in mind limits ROI (unless Liquid, but I'll come onto that)
- It's easy for experienced domainers to say to a new domainer - 'buy one great .COM instead of 100 other .COM/non-COMs' but in reality, this is really hard for someone to do without having experienced what constitutes a 'great' domain vs a crap one.
Yes, theoretically its possible to learn this through a few days of extensive research, but great domains have a high-barrier to entry - they can't be found for a few hundred bucks.
In reality, most of us think we know better and then learn through our own experiences/mistakes. Better to do this with a couple of hundred bucks than several thousand.
A final point about investment styles / suggested certainty of liquid values...
100% agree with
@promo , new investors/domainers should stick to .COM - because like for like, any other extension is harder to sell and more expensive to renew.
However, I don't get the whole concept of random 4L.com having persistent/safe monetary storage value... it feels like tulip-mania to assign a floor price to something that nobody would ever use and call it an asset. For me, the probability of an end-user wanting the domain is it's true connection to value. If the only other people that see value in a domain are other investors (not end users), it's worthless to me.
When it comes to domains, I also personally prefer calculated risks (call it lottery tickets) over safe investment. That's just me - I like the risk/return of exponential payoff with domains rather than market movement of a commodity-like asset. For safe (passive) investment, it makes more sense to push money into indices, bonds and ETFs - even equities.
I'd question how many people (outside of China) become domainers or start domain trading because they're looking for safe investments or non-fiat storage. Most people (myself included) are initially drawn into this like moths to a flame, watching DomainSherpa interviews and hearing about rags to riches stories on a XX into XX,XXX flip. Then the reality sets in... most of us learn the hard way, it's not that easy.
I digress, but my point is that a strong .CO portfolio can still produce yields. It will just have a larger standard-deviation of ROI than a 4L.com portfolio of equal value - therefore, it represents higher risk. If you can't afford the risk in the first place, it's not worth it at all.
Lastly, if you're a beginner starting to build a portfolio that includes non-COM, you shouldn't put all your eggs into one basket. By eggs, I mean money. And by 'basket', I mean TLD and/or niche. It restricts your ability to learn and increases your overall risk.
