analysis A Strong 2020 So Far In The .CO Extension

Anecdotally, it seems that 2020 has been stronger than normal in .co sales. There are regular sales over $1000 reported on NameBio, sometimes multiple in the same day. I take a look at how .co has done compared to the past ten years, to see if this really is a stronger than normal year. I also look at the parameters of .co names selling for $1000 or more this year.


.CO Sales By Year

I first looked at the number of NameBio-reported .co domain name sales by year for a ten year period. For 2020, since we were at the 297th day of year on the date, Oct 24, 2020, I accessed the data, I extrapolated, assuming the rate will stay the same in the remaining two months. It turns out that even without extrapolation there have been more .co sales in 2020 than any year except 2016.



Sales Volume By Year

Because NameBio is a mix of wholesale and retail domain transactions, a more useful measure than the number of sales is the sales volume. That data is plotted below. Again 2020 is strong in sales dollar volume in .co, although the changes from year to year are not dramatic.



What About 2020 .CO Sales Prices?

Interestingly, the average prices vary quite extensively, and 2016, which had the highest number of .co sales at 1699, and one of the highest sales volumes at about $1.3 million, also had the lowest average sales price of $777. That probably suggests that domainer acquisitions in .co were higher than normal in 2016.

The average .co price in 2020 is $1372, down somewhat from the previous two years when the average was $2622 in 2019 and $2468 in 2018, but higher than the average prices in the three prior years. Of course, average prices can be strongly influenced by a few high-value sales.

I looked at how the 2020 .co sales prices were distributed in the following graph. While some high-value sales happen, the majority of sales are in the hundreds of dollars range. Many of these may be acquisitions by domain investors, but I think there are a significant number of end-user sales in .co at these levels. There were 21 .co sales above $10,000 this year, and 51 sales above $5000.



Readers may find it interesting to compare these sales prices with the asking prices for .co that I covered in last week’s blog post. Keep in mind, though, that NameBio sales are a mix of wholesale and retail, so the relationship is not simple.

If we look all-time, rather than just 2020, there have been 18 .co sales at prices of $50,000 plus, although only 3 at $100,000 or more.


Top .CO Sales So Far In 2020

Here is a list of the 2020 .co sales above $10,000, as of Oct 24.

• dance $58,000
• upper $35,000
• routine $31,000
• circa $28,000
• offices $22,467
• declare $22,000
• five $20,900
• wholesome $17,500
• CSA $15,692
• medallion $15,000
• period $15,000
• conjure $14,500
• IZI $14,292
• founders $13,000
• ruby $12,500
• staircase $11,500
• wings $10,690
• NFQ $10,000
• layer $10,000

How Long Are .CO Names That Sold For $1000 Or More?

I looked in more detail at the .co domain names that sold for $1000 or more in 2020. Supposedly at that price point the vast majority are retail sales to end users. In terms of length, the vast majority of these sales were from 3 to 9 letters long.



Interestingly, within that range, the average price did not vary significantly with domain length until 10 characters or more. Note these are average prices only for the sales at prices of $1000 or more.

• 3 letters, $5051
• 4 letters, $4232
• 5 letters, $6344
• 6 letters, $3585
• 7 letters, $5364
• 8 letters, $3800
• 9 letters, $6067

For 10, 11 and 12 characters the numbers are tiny, but average prices were less than $2000.


What Type Of .CO Names Sell?

Here are some other features I noted for .co domain names that sold for $1000 or more in 2020.

• Of the 168 names with length 4 characters or more, about 17% were plural.
• None of the names included a hyphen.
• Just 2 of the names were alphanumeric, 123hyphens and fitness360.
• None were numeric.
• While most were English language, there were a number of French names such as fleurand chateau, and multiple Spanish names including couture, kinogo and farmacy. German words include klick and regen, while katapult is a word in several languages including Dutch.
• There were not many two word names that sold above $1000, but a few. Among the higher value two word sales were PopKey $6666, OneClick $5000 and SewingMachine $4330.
• No particular sector seemed to dominate. There were a few Cannabis/CBD names, such as kush and WeedHub, but not a many. Nor did technology, or cryptocurrency, education or health dominate.
• There were a handful of first or surnames that sold, such as Penelope and Glen, and a few place names such as Brooklyn.
• I was surprised how many made-up or creative spelling words were in the list. Here are a few, but there were many others as well: microtek, tagg, agro, starr, and xplor.
• While many sales were very common words, less common words also occasionally sell for good amounts. For example, Nikul Sanghvi of hypernames sold syzygy.co for $4750. It is an astronomical term, with roots back in ancient Greek, meaning three or more celestial objects in a straight line. The term does have numerous uses outside its astronomical origin, however.
• For the English language words in the list of sales over $1000, I went through by hand and classified as noun, verb, adjective or adverb. Not surprisingly, almost 73% were nouns.

Why Is .CO As Popular As It Is?

Surveys found that 4% of 2020 startups are using a .co domain name, while 3.7% of Y-Combinator companies use .co. While those numbers are still much less than .com, .co has done better than most generic country or new extensions. Why is that?

There are undoubtedly many reasons, including the fact that .co is a shortened form of .com, although that can be a negative as well. I think another reason is that the registry has done better than most in promoting the extension. For example, there is a nice set of case studies with a great graphical interface that allows you to find businesses using the extension in any part of the world. They also have a well written and presented section on why use .co. I think other registries would do well to emulate what they are doing. Those considering an extension want to see examples of companies already using the extension.

Generally speaking, it seems to me wise, if you have decided to invest in .co at all, to mainly consider relatively short single-word, or brandable near-word, .co domain names in situations where there are numerous potential users and where the .com is either developed, or offered at a price that would be outside the budget of many users.

NamePros member Nomad91 recently announced a $10,000 sale of the domain name complex.co to a business that already had the same word in .com. It will be interesting to see if that happens regularly, as it would be a sign of increasing acceptance of the importance of the extension.

It should be kept in mind that .co is the country code extension for Colombia, so unlike an extension like .io, there is a significant population for which it is the country code.

If you want to do your own analysis, here is the full list of NameBio-recorded 2020 .co sales, while here is the list restricted to sales at $1000 or more. As the link will be updated to the current date, it is likely it will include a few additional sales to those analyzed here.

UPDATES: The list of non-English words and brandable words has been updated after information kindly provided by readers. Also the Y-Combinator percentage was adjusted to 3.7% from 3.8%.

Sincere thanks to NameBio for the incredible database that makes analyses such as this both possible and easy to do. Indeed we are fortunate to have NameBio. Thank you Michael.