Did you register the .co domain for your website yet? If you missed the launch on July 20th, your next order of business may be to visit your registrar to protect your internet properties – and to see if the short, snappy, or keyword-rich domain name you’ve always wanted is available.
.co Makes Logical Sense
In the 25 years since .com launched, more than 90 million .com websites have been registered. While other top level domains (TLDs) have come and gone, .co is speculated to be the next .com due to its association with “company,” “commerce,” and “corporation,” as well as the familiarity of .co in country-specific domains, such as .co.uk and .co.jp. In the two weeks since the launch, nearly 400,000 .co domains have already been registered.
Fortune 500 Companies Buying .co Domains
It’s not just cybersquatters who snapped up .co domain names at $30 per year. In fact, 70% of companies who are in the Brand Finance Top 500 have purchased .co extensions, including Apple, American Express, Amazon, BMW, Canon, Cartier, CNN, Disney, Ebay, Coca-Cola, Ford, Hilton, Google, Honda, IKEA, Kodak, IBM, McDonalds, MTV, Microsoft, Nokia, Nike, Sony, Samsung, Toyota, Toshiba, Visa, Yahoo, and numerous others.
Opportunity to Shorten Your Domain
Other companies are viewing the .cos as a smart opportunity to rebrand themselves with the domain names they’ve always coveted. Twitter purchased t.co, while Overstock bought o.co for $350,000, and e.co’s auction ended at $81,000. Other interesting purchases of .co domains include:
Categorized as a “Global” Extension by Google
Before the launch, some critics of .co were wary about the possibility that the Columbia-based extension would be considered by Google to remain a country code top-level domain (ccTLD), as it did with the .cm extension, making SEO difficult on a global level. However, two days after the launch, an official Google spokesperson remarked, ”We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools.” Google will treat .co domains in the same fashion as .com, .org, .net, and other internationally used extensions – making .co indeed a viable, mainstream alternative to .com.
At 90 million domain names, .com is indeed beyond saturated, and .co may just be the extension to open another 90 million opportunities in the years to come.