.co .CO - The Discussion, Showcase and Sales Report Thread

[ZOX]

Well, it seems like Colombia will be releasing .CO to the internet market:
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http://www.mincomunicaciones.gov.co...ge=./mods/contenido/noticia_user_view&id=1043
...
This could truly be a big competitor to .COM (especially being a "typo").
I would say with proper guidance .CO could REALLY have a bright future!
...
Let me know your thoughts please.

 

[Oppinus]

I would invest in one .com vs many .co.

1. There is zero chances of selling several .co for 10k in the first year. Not by the same owner anyways!

2. Consider renewal fees on hundreds of names vs just one nice .com.

3. .com is proven and recognized worldwide. .co will never achieve recognition on a global scale.

1. Well several people did it already and I am one of them so the chances certainly are ABOVE zero

2. You have MAXIMUM $10.000 renewal fees a year. Selling 2-3 domains at $10.000 a year you have 100-200% ROI EACH YEAR short term, selling long term for maybe $100.000, you have ROI 1000% and more.

3. Who cares what recognition .co achieves for somebody who can count

 

[Keith]

1. Well several people did it already and I am one of them so the chances certainly are ABOVE zero

2. You have MAXIMUM $10.000 renewal fees a year. Selling 2-3 domains at $10.000 a year you have 100-200% ROI short term, selling long term for maybe $100.000, you have ROI 1000% and more.

3. Who cares what recognition .co achieves for somebody who can count

Name them.

If you did it then I applaud your achievement. I assume you realize that you are in the minority. Most .co investors will lose money and that's a fact. There are around 1 million .co registered with minimal big sales reported.

 

[johname]

It's possible to sell a .co for 10k but it would have to be very special circumstances (and name lol) like acquiring the first run names like mr mann did, or a LLL.co that a company feels they have to have. The other part is having the kahunas to say no to there lesser offers and sticking to 10k sales price. (This is offen easyer to do if you already have $xxxx in the name, not when you paid regfee for it.)

 

[Oppinus]

Name them.

Dont take it personally Keith, but I am not here to fill your knowledge gaps. If you, like me, observed the market cautiously (f.e. the sedo auction, dnjournal) then you would know them.

If you did it then I applaud your achievement. I assume you realize that you are in the minority. Most .co investors will lose money and that's a fact. There are around 1 million .co registered with minimal big sales reported.

Well, do you really think most investors, who put their money in 110 million .com will EARN money?

 

[Kate]

It seems that what we see as investment and what as speculation is very subjective.

Yes, it it

When Ostrofsky bought Business.com for $150.000 in 1997, people thought (especially the "serious investors"): "only an idiot would pay so much for a domain name". He had to hide his identity as buyer in order not to disqualify himself as serious businessman.
Investing in domains (and .coms were probably the only domains people invested in at that time) were DEFINITELY considered speculation, although it turned out to be a much better investment than the type of investments which people called "investments" in 1997...

That was back then. The difference is that today the concept is proven (unlike .co for instance), we know domain names are valuable, it's been established.
Unfortunately, few people still get it. Which is a blessing in some way because it means opportunities to tap into an opportunity that few people know about
Domainers are a rare breed, there are not that many people on Earth armed with the knowledge.

By the way LONG TERM "investments" in regard to internet are extremely risky, so they dont deserve the name "investment" according to your definition. To realize this just compare the internet in 1995 with 2011 - nobody can say how internet will look like in 2025.

True, but I don't think domain names are going to vanish fast. I think there are here to stay for longer than we imagine. The whole system works, is scalable and can accommodate new services. So much money has been invested in domains and the branding that goes with it, that nobody seriously wants to ditch it all imo.
But no investment is absolutely without risk.

Note that for people who bought or registered .com domains in early days (for investment) these domains were liabilities for a long time before there appeared any monetization possibilities. And despite that exactly those investments were the most profitable.

True again, one of the problems with domain names is the lack of liquidity. You must be prepared to hold to maximize value.

 

[Keith]

Dont take it personally Keith, but I am not here to fill your knowledge gaps. If you, like me, observed the market cautiously (f.e. the sedo auction, dnjournal) then you would know them.



Well, do you really think most investors, who put their money in 110 million .com will EARN money?

I observe fine and see very little proof of substantial .co sales. Few folks realizing positive sales does not equate to overall market values.

No but your question was about investing in hundreds of .co vs one quality .com. It doesn't take a domain scientist to figure out the correct answer

 

[Oppinus]

I observe fine and see very little proof of substantial .co sales. Few folks realizing positive sales does not equate to overall market values.

No but your question was about investing in hundreds of .co vs one quality .com. It doesn't take a domain scientist to figure out the correct answer

No, my question was about a REAL situation, where you have a certain amount of money to invest. You take $10.000 and spend it on ONE(!!!) THIRD RANGE .com or you register 400 (FOUR HUNDRED!!!) QUALITY .co in the landrush.

If you believe you can get a quality .com for $10.000, so please name it and then look at my signature in order to compare it to the kind of .co domains I registered. It doesnt take a scientist to understand that.

 

[DU]

No, my question was about a REAL situation, where you have a certain amount of money to invest. You take $10.000 and spend it on one third range .com or you register 400 quality .co in the landrush.

If you believe you can get a quality .com for $10.000, so please name it and then look at my signature in order to compare it to the kind of .co domains I registered. It doesnt take a scientist to understand that.

You can get plenty of quality .com for $10K

People seem to define quality as being the one word, key word, so called category killer names that sell for $100Ks.

You can get plenty of quality in .me, .pro, .us, .tv, .im too.

It's not about left of the dot and right of the dot. It's about the sum of parts. You also have oro.co listed at $10K - so I'm not sure what your point is. No one else can register that now. You need to talk in terms of the present and not in terms of the past. The Land Rush happened - you can't invest there anymore....it would have been better to register in 2000 if we can go back in time

I can find a better name than oro.co for $10K unless I needed something short, something spanish, and something meaning gold

The aftermarket argument is bs anyway, for the most part.

 

[steveteva]

Well I think that having 400 quality .co can make you money in a little of time compare to your 1 .com that worth $10000. Now all depends on your domains too.

The only cons is renewal fees

 

[Keith]

No, my question was about a REAL situation, where you have a certain amount of money to invest. You take $10.000 and spend it on one third range .com or you register 400 quality .co in the landrush.

If you believe you can get a quality .com for $10.000, so please name it and then look at my signature in order to compare it to the kind of .co domains I registered. It doesnt take a scientist to understand that.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your allotted amount. I'm assuming you are talking 10 thousand dollars. I would not spend 10k on several .co to save my life. However, I would'nt hesitate to buy a quality .com for 10k if my budget allowed.

 

[Kate]

You can get plenty of quality .com for $10K

Exactly. You could buy a decent LLL.com for example.

I can find a better name than oro.co for $10K unless I needed something short, something spanish, and something meaning gold

True oro.co is nice but it will take a lot of luck to sell this one for 10K. .co domains are less liquid and will fetch much lower amounts than their .com counterparts. It's high risk if you buy a lot, and they hardly sell, then they are liabilities.
As always, quality over quantity...

 

[Zona]

New to the .CO discussion so if this has been covered before, please feel free to just refer me to the correct thread or post ...

How are .CO's ranking with Google, Bing and Yahoo? Are any developed sites with the .CO extension getting ranked?

 

[the_poet]

New to the .CO discussion so if this has been covered before, please feel free to just refer me to the correct thread or post ...

How are .CO's ranking with Google, Bing and Yahoo? Are any developed sites with the .CO extension getting ranked?

I'll try to be as concise as possible.

Google treats and ranks .CO as a gTLD, since you can change the country you want to target in Webmaster Tools and this was officially confirmed here

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=18cfda837cec2f50&hl=en

As for ranking, if you do a quick search on Google

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aco

you'll find 120+ million results, from all countries. What matters in Google's eyes is mainly a combination of quality backlinks and development, this is what will make your site rank higher, even higher than .com. For example, if you search for BMR, .CO is on first page, .com on second.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bmr

 

[DU]

I'll try to be as concise as possible.

More concise:

.anything ranks well if you have enough content, visitors, links relative to your competition.

As for ranking, if you do a quick search on Google

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aco

you'll find 120+ million results

Just indexed pages. Is not really relevant to ranking.

this is what will make your site rank higher, even higher than .com. For example, if you search for BMR, .CO is on first page, .com on second.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bmr

.co will rank higher than .com if the relative quality and relevance is greater.

BMR.co - the name of the store is BMR. I would expect many people to search for the name of the store.

BMR.com - is Bio-Medical Research. I would think they don't care about ranking for BMR but would Bio Medical Research. Ah... a top 2 ranking.

If you don't have content, don't provide anything relevant then you shouldn't rank. Non end user SEO is ruining the internet imho.

---------- Post added at 10:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:52 PM ----------

Actually, I'm tired of people saying that they rank on page one on Google. Yes, if you put <yourdomain> in Google and there is little competition you will be on page one. Congratulations.

 

[Oppinus]

If you believe you can get a quality .com for $10000, so please name it

However, I would'nt hesitate to buy a quality .com for 10k if my budget allowed.

Please find and name this quality .com you would buy if you had $10k as investment, so I know what you are talking about.

 

[DU]

Please find a name this quality .com you would buy if you had $10k, so I know what you are talking about.

Quality is subjective. As I said - if I wanted a super short name that meant gold in Spanish and I had some cash to invest then ORO.CO is a great name.

But it's all dependent on what you are after.

If I owned a business that was based on branding then "namestrategy.com" would be better than all your names because it is what I want.

This was actually recent purchase by a branding company. As an END USER they paid $3,333 for a name that is an almost perfect match for what they are selling.. "brandstrategy.com" is the only thing better imho...

I know this particular area because I was looking for a name for similar market segment and did a lot of investigation and looking around. Personally I liked BrandJive.com which is listed for $995 at Sedo but I was worried about Jive Software TM so I went for NameArt.com instead which fits my notion of what a branding site would be.

These are names that I would love to have.. and all under $1K.

A lot of what you can get is based on WHO is selling. The reason that some keywords are so expensive is because the seller can afford to hold. This is not always true. Some people can turn down $600,000, some people will freak out with an offer of $1000. The market is all over the place

Point is that someone like Rick Schwartz would have asked $50K for that name and probably got it but as it is.. NameStrategy went for $3k. It's a perfect brand name and it was WELL under $10K. As far as other examples? Its hard to know what you can get for $10K until you start offering money. I'm sure DNJournal has some you can find.

For ORO.CO? If I could stretch $10K to $22K I would have gone for Karat.com which I think is a better name. Twice the cost? Sure, but it has 5% of the risk in terms of resale right now.

Quality isn't about single keywords - often a single word isn't as effective as two words.

Gold.com isn't as good as Cash4Gold.com as an example. Sometimes the second word is needed to explain the name. The exception is when you are strictly talking about brands.

As an example: lawyers would rather have "LawyerName"Law.com than Lawyer.com in my opinion because their name is important to what they are selling.

I'm sure others will have fine examples for you.

 

[Oppinus]

Quality is subjective. As I said - if I wanted a super short name that meant gold in Spanish and I had some cash to invest then ORO.CO is a great name.

But it's all dependent on what you are after.

If I owned a business that was based on branding then "namestrategy.com" would be better than all your names because it is what I want.

This was actually recent purchase by a branding company. As an END USER they paid $3,333 for a name that is an almost perfect match for what they are selling.. "brandstrategy.com" is the only thing better imho...

I know this particular area because I was looking for a name for similar market segment and did a lot of investigation and looking around. Personally I liked BrandJive.com which is listed for $995 at Sedo but I was worried about Jive Software TM so I went for NameArt.com instead which fits my notion of what a branding site would be.

These are names that I would love to have.. and all under $1K.

A lot of what you can get is based on WHO is selling. The reason that some keywords are so expensive is because the seller can afford to hold. This is not always true. Some people can turn down $600,000, some people will freak out with an offer of $1000. The market is all over the place

Point is that someone like Rick Schwartz would have asked $50K for that name and probably got it but as it is.. NameStrategy went for $3k. It's a perfect brand name and it was WELL under $10K. As far as other examples? Its hard to know what you can get for $10K until you start offering money. I'm sure DNJournal has some you can find.

For ORO.CO? If I could stretch $10K to $22K I would have gone for Karat.com which I think is a better name. Twice the cost? Sure, but it has 5% of the risk in terms of resale right now.

Quality isn't about single keywords - often a single word isn't as effective as two words.

Gold.com isn't as good as Cash4Gold.com as an example. Sometimes the second word is needed to explain the name. The exception is when you are strictly talking about brands.

As an example: lawyers would rather have "LawyerName"Law.com than Lawyer.com in my opinion because their name is important to what they are selling.

I'm sure others will have fine examples for you.

You still didnt answer the simple question:
You have $10k to invest. What .com name exactly do you buy for investment? (not as end user - we were talking about investment vs speculation, didnt we?). The names you named sum up to around $40k, but you have only $10k to invest.

 

[DU]

Yep. This was It.

 

[jecy]

Hello,

How to find the daily .CM and .CO deleted domain list?

 

[Ms Domainer]

*

I have the .co version of ThoughtForTheDay, which redirects to the site in my signature.

So far, other than my testing the link, not one incoming link has come via the .co domain.

I have other domains (not so great .coms, but brandable ones) redirecting to the site, and they give me some traffic.

I think we have to be realistic about this TLD. It might take off, but, so far, it's been disappointing.

I'm not a .co hater, just a realist.

*

 

[the_poet]

@Jennifer

Why don't you setup your website on ThoughtForTheDay.CO and redirect the .US to it? Since Google treats .CO like a gTLD, your site could rank better internationally than .US, which is optimized for US only. With .CO, you can choose the country in the geotargeting menu in Webmaster Tools or leave it unchecked (which is the best option if you aren't targeting a particular country). IMHO ccTLDs that haven't this option in Webmaster Tools (like .US) should be used only for national content-oriented websites.

 

[Keith]

Please find and name this quality .com you would buy if you had $10k as investment, so I know what you are talking about.

I'm not going to list specific names. However, 10k would buy some of the best cvcv out there. I also know of a triple premium LLL that sold for around $7k here at NP within the last year. On the other hand, I've seen premium LLL .co struggle to fetch mid $xx around here.

It's all about QUALITY, not quantity. IMO it would be a major mistake to spend $10k on hundreds of .co vs 1 quality .com.

 

[the_poet]

It's all about QUALITY, not quantity. IMO it would be a major mistake to spend $10k on hundreds of .co vs 1 quality .com.

If you wanted to invest $10K in .CO, why would you have to buy hundreds of low quality domains (it would be an average of $20-$30 per domain, practically reg fee)? I think nobody would do that. Of course, you could choose a .com, but you could also acquire a few (super)premium .CO's with that money, which would be a similarly reasonable strategy.

 

[rusty1000]

If you wanted to invest $10K in .CO, why would you have to buy hundreds of low quality domains (it would be an average of $20-$30 per domain, practically reg fee)? I think nobody would do that. Of course, you could choose a .com, but you could also acquire a few (super)premium .CO's with that money, which would be a reasonable strategy for .CO investors.

Buying one or two .co's for that sum would be quite risky and somewhat reckless. The way I see it, the prime period for selling .co premium names has come and gone. The hype surrounding the Super Bowl ad has faded, the o.co rebranding might not be a rebranding after all, the big Sedo .co auction was disappointing. Not much left. So, if you were to "invest" that kind of money in a single name, my guess is that you are going to end up losing money regardless of how long you choose to hold it. Sure, you might get lucky, but I don't think the odds are in your favor.


I wanted to add that my opinion is to be construed to applying to English language names. Perhaps, in Colombia, they could move towards widespread use of .co rather than the second level .com.co. I'm not familiar with that market nor do I know how that might affect prices for Spanish language names if that were to occur.

 

[the_poet]

Buying one or two .co's for that sum would be quite risky and somewhat reckless. The way I see it, the prime period for selling .co premium names has come and gone. The hype surrounding the Super Bowl ad has faded, the o.co rebranding might not be a rebranding after all, the big Sedo .co auction was disappointing. Not much left. So, if you were to "invest" that kind of money in a single name, my guess is that you are going to end up losing money regardless of how long you choose to hold it. Sure, you might get lucky, but I don't think the odds are in your favor.

You wouldn't have to invest looking at the Sedo auction or the GoDaddy's Superbowl commercial. Doing that would mean being shortsighted, since .CO isn't an extension for a quick flip. Anyway, .CO and .com aren't the only options: if you live in a country which has a worthy ccTLD (.de and .co.uk to name the most popular ones), you could consider investing in it.