Cnet.com just published a story on the .Co registry and Its CEO Juan Calle.
The Story entitled: “CO Internet is a company cool enough for Brooklyn hipsters” was written by Paul Sloan who has written about the domain name industry before.
The article starts out:
“Suddenly, the outfit behind the .co domain is everywhere, even if many people barely notice. It’s all part of Juan Diego Calle’s shrewd strategy”.
“”If you haven’t heard of Juan Diego Calle’s company quite yet, consider yourself not among the in-the-know here over the last few days.
“I’m referring to .CO Internet, the Miami company that fought hard to land a contract with the government of Colombia so it could commercialize the country’s top-level-domain, or TLD.””
The article goes on to say:
“Since .Co’s rolled out to the public in July 2010, about 1.3 million have been registered. ”
“”Diego Calle said the company’s revenue for the past 12 months is about $25 million, which is an impressive number when you consider he the names have only been available since for a year and half.”
Its a great article for .Co which is certainly making a huge splash at the SXSW Show.
They used the language “have been registered”. That’s not necessarily the same as “are registered”, because they might be including domains that were registered and then got dropped/expired/deleted. If they published a zone file, they could be included on sites like Registrarstats.com for transparency.
Many .co’s dropped between July on, as renewals were running x3 of .com.
Speculator buyers dropped them based on lack of demand, and non performance of traffic which never showed up based on typo of the .com.
you boys quibble about semantics, boys will always be just boys
this is what separates Calle and the men among us.
We think BIG.
We think in BIG TERMS.
and I mean BIG.
like knocking off .com and
being the new King of the jungle.
current 1,300,000 registered domains means its growth rate will surpass .com’s
it is only a matter of time.
Chill Robert. I am happy to hear this news. with this and all the LLL.co’s registered I do see .co being a major player down the road. I haven’t noticed to many sales in the last few months. At least not a $100k or above sale in a very long time.
David
Most of you are in big trouble (that means you reading this), spending time fighting the trend of .Co new dominance and not spending time finding .Co domains to register
and paying up into .Co ‘s ever increasing marketing power.
.Co is a revolution and in a revolution like all revolutions the holdouts always get forced into registering .Co and
.com will go down burning. It will be a sad testament to many of you .com holdouts.
when the time comes .com will be thrown out with the garbage and people will not be able to get rid of them fast enough.
Be warned,
BUY
.Co
now or be left behind !!!
the good thing now is I am still available to
save some of you. I don’t know how long, but I am still around
to convert you to the new order of things,
to the prophesy of .Co
repent and ask for your .Co salvation now for the day of reckoning is coming.
.Co eats Crow..
@MHB
prolific last 24 hrs, your giving Frager a run for the money
I know I am gonna regret this.
@RobertCline – you are only making more people hate .co. Where in the world did you get that .co is going to beat .com. I love .co’s but .com will always be king. Again I love reading the .co comments on this blog but I really have a hard time reading yours. Its like the time when I threw up in my mouth. That’s how I feel when I read your tardtastic comments.
@Dave
you got to have the capacity (be it mental or divine) to leap forward more than just a few steps.
The fact that .Co is considered the same as .com on one level
then you add the fact that we want things done now or yesterday,
want to get there faster, quicker, with less key stokes,
plus the Y gen and me gen, and twitter’s every key stroke counts
and moreover, people don’t want to be typing that extra senseless M.
So extrapolating all this out with the current trajectory of .Co
is where I can definitively say with conviction, drum roll, please
.Co is your new King.
Maybe we’ve been looking at Robert Cline all wrong, thinking he has a bunch of .co. I’m thinking maybe he’s invested in other extensions, might not have any .co at all and more of an .co saboteur. The registry is probably getting an offer together to pay Robert to shut up.
@George Kirikos
1.5 months ago DomainIncited reported* that the file zone contained “more than 1.1 million domains”. Considering that during last 1.5 months the extension received huge exposure with the SuperBowl commercial and .COs have been sold for $9 at GoDaddy, the figures might be real.
* domainincite.com/me-beating-co-in-start-ups/
I own MiamiFlorida.co..almost nil in type in traffic but I got a great deal on it a while ago. I suspect it will have solid development value if especially subdomains are used..example Hotels.MiamiFloria.com. Will test this out. Low risk, high reward.
“example Hotels.MiamiFloria.com”
You noticed you used .com instead of .co? You just illustrated the problem.
Good link Joe – * domainincite.com/me-beating-co-in-start-ups/
Was just reading on Techcrunch about Just.me – http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/just-me-preview/
Looks like the co-founder of TechCrunch is behind that one.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
time for my smoke
pass the pipe marijuanaguy dot com
if for none other
hedge your bets
at least and pickup a few quality .Co’s while they are still available.
@Robert
“.com will go down burning. It will be a sad testament to many of you .com holdouts.’
‘to convert you to the new order of things,
to the prophesy of .Co
repent and ask for your .Co salvation now for the day of reckoning is coming’
I think it’s time to unplug the computer and find yourself a life outside of domaining.
Organic typein traffic for BeautyCompany.com has increased exponentially since what appears to be a live site at TheBeautyCompany.co went live.
Thanks you “.co” registry ::))
Just a bit of reality to those new to the world of investing in domains getting ready to mortgage the house, max out the credit cards and “invest” someone else’s money.
In what part of this article do these kind of facts get mentioned ?
go to google’s home page
google.com
and type in
“jam star”
what you will find is
jamstar.co right at top, ahead of jamstar.com which is a fricken parked site.
The second landrush anniversary in a new TLD is always the most important one. While many of the highly speculative registrations will get dropped at the first landrush anniversary, the second is where larger portfolio owners have to make the decision on whether they hold or fold. Some of the small scale domainers who picked up drops from the first landrush drops also have the same decision to make.
From looking at the domain footprints of various country level markets, there’s a major shift towards the ccTLD/.COM axis and it can represent over 80% of a country’s domain market. The non-core TLDs (net/org/biz/info/mobi/asia/eu/co etc) are finding it hard going because of the development focus on the core ccTLD/COM axis domains. As most business is local, most businesses will develop in the most high profile TLDs rather than one of the non-core ones (unless there is a very good reason).
The big challenge for .CO is in development. Many of the initial registrations will have been brand protection registrations and these will often point to the brand owner’s primary website. Smaller businesses might have bought keyword domains and pointed them to their primary website. Most of the speculative domains will either be PPC parked or holding pages. Many of these domains will never be developed as they are exercises in financial optimism by their owners and they may be waiting for a payday that will never come.
All this publicity for .CO is great but if people don’t use it and develop it, then it runs the risk of becoming another .EU ccTLD.
@Joe Yes but the nature of the startups may have been a factor. The .me ccTLD is the ideal Social Media type TLD whereas the .co has a wider appeal to startups.
@John McCormac
I think Calle and team targeting
entrepreneurial minded young up and coming, next google and facebiik
is exactly that.
also consider what the bulk of the internet usage really is
companies going on the internet make up 98% of monetary transactions performed on the internet
.Co is by far way and above in smack in the middle of the this huge enormous giganulomous sweet spot.
@Robert Clineee
It is a very good strategy and it is based on at least one of these startups becoming the next Google or Facebook. However the five year failure rate in startups is quite high. The .CO is very far from being in the sweetspot of e-commerce. Most e-commerce will be done through .com sites and increasingly through localised ccTLD sites. In countries like the UK and Germany, even .COM is under pressure as more people use .UK and .DE in those countries than use .COM. This shift towards ccTLDs has been going on for years and ICANN’s dithering about introducing new gTLDs has helped. In real terms, .CO’s competition is not from .COM but rather from the non-core TLDs. It has the advantage and disadvantage of being a short (two character) TLD but that’s a distraction. When .mobi launched, people used to claim that it had too many letters. However .INFO had the same number and there were millions of .CO.UK and other ccTLD subdomain domains registered at the time. From working on TLD web surveys, the web is not as simple as people think. Not every site on the web is an e-commerce site and most of them, the ones that are not big e-commerce or PPC parked/holding pages, are brochureware. To gain credibility, .CO needs to be so obvious that people don’t stop to think about it. The .COM is like this. So are the ccTLDs. But when people hear about a non-core TLD like net/biz/info/mobi/asia/eu/co etc, there is a slight hesitation as they try to remember if they’ve seen any such sites before.
@John McCormac
I like your thinking
it is true about the fracturing of internet addresses.
we are seeing this with more cctld and gtld sales every week than .com addresses now.
many on this board are very americanized centric, like they haven’t seen outside of their own city walls. that is why they are astonished to hear about $xxx,xxx sales on LLL.de domains, etc.
.Co
is what I call the stars are aligned, pre-destined to succeed.
when you have all the right ingredients, you cannot not become excited about the fruits of the blossom.
But you are the most sensible person to come across this board in a long while. kudos to that.
Robert Clineee,
I’ve read through all of your comments on how great the .co is, then all of the suddenly I saw the outbound link in your nick/name pointing to a website, which I assumed is your or at least you know the owner of that site.
Here is what I have found, the website mentioned still have its name available to register in .co extension. Why did you let it go?
@Son. The better question is why does it point to a .com?
David
“The second landrush anniversary in a new TLD is always the most important one.”
Is that the part where the second mortgage on the house will never be paid back and the credit card at 15%-18% cannot be paid back and you end up voting for FoodStamps and Obamacare ?
“The better question is why does it point to a .com?”
Looks like Robert Clinee just got busted. He’s not a true believer in .co.
I think we have less than average intelligence on this board.
I am a net neutral type of guy.
I say .Co is better than .com when I see it this way.
I bought .com back in 1998 when they obviously didn’t have .Co you idiots.
I will certainly have to upgrade that site however as well but it is trademarked so no one can have it anyways.
.Co is your new King foreverrrr!
Robert – But isn’t epier.co shorter and ideal for mobile? What excuse do you have to wait?
Hello Folks,
My child is missing. His name is Robert Clineee. He was born retarded. Although we’ve spent much effort to help him, his intelligence keep staying below the IQ of 1.
You may find his picture on a milk carton. If you happen to see him, please kindly report to the nearest mental institution.
All kidding aside. Robert, you need to get a life man. You are either one of .CO registry’s employee or Calle himself. Either way, stop ranting with tardtastic (loved the vocabulary). We all have rights to our opinion, but yours are just plain stupid and annoying. I bet you haven’t got laid for awhile. You should thank me for giving you this suggestion. Now go get a life.
@ Robert Clinneee Did you check if Tardtastic.co is available? Or maybe you already have Tardtastic.com and really don’t want the .co? Just sayin’
@Robert Clineee did you check it Tardtastic.co is available? Or did you buy the .com? Just sayin’
Robert Clineee,
Godaddy is having .co on sale for 7.99 (x3 times for renewal though) … I think it’s better to spend a few bucks now, rather than waste time + money to settle the UDRP dispute later on — don’t you think?
Oh wait… since you’re smarter, you should have already calculated the math. My bad!!
You know you’re having an affect when they get personal.
They can’t hack it so they resort to attacking the messenger.
Shameful.
@Robert Clineee
Son, who said anything about getting personal. This is becoming very entertaining.
I can picture you right now, rapping to one of Eminem’s song called “Without Me”. DJ, turn up the volume…
“Now this looks like a job for me so everybody just follow me
cuz we need a little controversy,
cuz it feels so empty without me”
Thank you Robert. You keep us very well entertained. Now let’s see the plain truth. Show us the list of .co you have? Make sure it’s not privacy protected or it doesn’t count.
Do you really want to see my list ?
I bet you won’t be able to handle the truth
It would take you the full day just to go through and verify the whole list since I have 986 .Co and 992 .com domains.
so, the .CO registrations have stopped their rush
@ Robert Clineee
Son, are you so proud that even yourself can’t stand it? LOL
Is that all you have? 986 .co and 999 .com? So you still believe in .com after all? This is quite contradicting to your so called endeavor for .co, isn’t it?
Of course I could handle the truth. But in this case there isn’t much to the truth because:
1) You are not providing the actual name list. What are you afraid of?
2) You are just peanut size comparing to many veteran domainers. It doesn’t take us the entire day. It would take about 5-10 minutes for a quick glance and probably 60 minutes max for a close-up review.
For your information, my combined portfolio is 46,718 domains. If I am lying about that, may lightning strike me dead on the spot of where I am sitting (it’s currently raining hard).
I am one of those veteran who believe .com is here to stay and will always be the king of the hill. I can see that you disagreed. I can respect that. What I don’t respect is your idiotic comments and annoying rants. The term tardtastic sum it up perfectly.
Why don’t you walk like you talk. Let see that list.
MHB, I have a theory….that you are having an affair with Robert Cline’s wife and whenever you want to pop round there and make sure you’re not disturbed you post up a new .co thread – ‘that’ll keep him busy for a couple of hours!’
Ok, so you asked for it.
to give you a good sampling here is the list of LLL.Co’s in my holdings. I have it set with LLL.com counterparts for comparisons.
if you click on the third column of LLL.Co’s they will go to their respective domains. I am the single largest LLL.Co holder with 800 plus triple letter LLL.Co domains plus I have almost 200 single word .Co domains like
donor.co
pledges.co
here is the full list:
http://www.eju.co/cat/special-categories/brandable/
and my LLL.Co’s:
http://www.eju.co/cat/special-categories/3%20Letter%20.co/
BTW, from a Twitter search, it looks like the team has donated some .COs to startups at SXSW.
This Robert Cline(ee) is an imposter
The real robert cline on other berkens threads has only one e and no link
Big waste of time to consider an anonymous comments that can’t be vetted
Would be taken much more seriously if there was a lust, a photo from a conference talking to people we know, a corporate website linked to comment like the one that makes CCIN or silver venture comments worthy of our time and attention
List not lust!
James
Well I am at ICANN and pretty busy
))::
Of course uyou have been distracted by Mr. Cline and missed the fact that like it our not .Co has made a huge splash at SXSW and the Cnet article only adds to it
Michael, thanks for writing up! appreciate it.
The only ones not liking it will be the new startups using .co when they have to start over. The Overstock mess of61 percent traffic loss should have been a wake up call.
thanks Mickael for not deleting my post.
oops looks like the server to the links is down.
I will have it back up later this afternoon when I get back in.
Thanks everyone.
@mccormack it’s one thing to look at domain name registrations through the zone file lense and draw conslusions about domain name registrations. but can we really make conclusions about “development” from simply looking at zone files? to make reasonable conclusions about percentages of “developed” domains requires more than just looking at zone file data. and gathering that data can be expensive. has the work been done?
of course, it’s a safe bet to say .co is largely undeveloped, even without supporting data. because anyone in the know realises that registry was not launched to provide domain names to businesses, whether in colombia or elsewhere. it is targeted at domainers (income from landrush) and to a lesser extent defensive registrations (income from sunrise). and they’ve done quite well in that regard. their costs are small. consequently the margins are huge. what happens to the registry long term, whether many .co sites actually point to content, is irrelevant to the registry. they’ve been successful already, simply by selling registrations at $40 for something that costs under $1/yr to create and maintain.
“Owen frager
This Robert Cline(ee) is an imposter”
That’s not true. The person that just posted before me under Robert Cline, just talked about his previous post with links to his sites being down, posted under Robert Clineee. Doesn’t really matter.
That CNET article:
“The one black eye on .CO Internet’s resume came when Overstock, which paid $350,000 for O.co and rebranded the businesses, decided to retreat to Overstock.com–an effort that hurt .co’s image but that Calle blames on Overstock.com’s marketing missteps.”
Marketing misstep is laughable. Again, what’s been pointed out many times already. This is really basic stuff. When you run a business, even 1 lost customer isn’t good. Confusion isn’t good. So knowing that, 61% is what? It’s a mess. That’s some of the first numbers we have. And people want to pretend it doesn’t exist, mainly people with a lot of .co in their portfolio.
It’s too close to the .com, there is no getting around that, it’s always going to be a problem. Marketing won’t fix it.
I own a .co with 1 million+ exact searches per month with $0.50 CPC and I’ll probably let it drop next year.
@Johnnie
“It’s too close to the .com, there is no getting around that, it’s always going to be a problem. Marketing won’t fix it.”
.com is America’s unofficial ccTLD, no wonder 99% of those repeating the same thing about the .co “bleeding to the .com” are Americans. But, beyond 300 million Americans, there are still 6.7 billion people who have not these mistyping issues.
Joe, you seem to forget that even tho “.com is America’s unofficial ccTLD” and the biggest extension on the planet, other countries have their own, .de, .co.uk etc.
I’m sure .co will have a better chance in Columbia.
@Johnnie
Exactly, other countries have their own ccTLDs which are pretty different from .co, so you have not the mistyping problem that is due to the similarity between the two extensions (take .de and .co for example).
Thanks for acknowledging the mistyping problem, that’s the point.
my domain list links from my previous message are back online.
on another news
.com ratings took a hit today being downgraded.
@yes Estimating web development from zonefiles is not really possible. The only way to do it is to survey websites, process the data and analyse that data. The processing and analysis are the expensive parts. I was running monthly web surveys of approximately 700K .CO domains that are tracked by the databases here and I published the results from the August 2011 .CO survey which covered 558,066 responding websites:
Web Type — Websites — % Websites
Active/unclassified: 67,976 – 12.1572%
Brand Protection: 10,429 – 1.8652%
Possibly Compromised: 32 – 0.0057%
In Page Redirect: 2,773 – 0.4959%
External TLD Redirects: 40,615 – 7.2638%
Forbidden/ Not Found: 6701 – 1.1984%
Holding Page: 67,943 – 12.1513%
Internal Site Redirect: 18,438 – 3.2975%
Expired Domain: 73,111 — 13.0755%
Premium Reserved: 3,409 – 0.6097%
Exact Match External TLD Redirect: 18,715 – 3.3471%
Duplicate Content: 233 – 0.0417%
PPC Parked: 227,727 — 40.7279%
Uncategorised Redirects: 1,091 – 0.1951%
For Sale/Rent: 5,483 – 0.9806%
Unavailable: 854 – 0.1527%
Adult (generic): 116 — 0.0207%
Redirect to .co sites: 13,497 – 2.4139%
While it is not a full zone survey, the number of sites surveyed provides a very good sample. The process I developed is quite different from the minimal samples (about 5k sites) and manual guessing approach used by some registries as it is designed for rapid search engine index constuction. I run a survey of approximately 350K tracked Irish domains and websites each month and run less frequent surveys on larger TLDs. The last major web survey was a .EU ccTLD survey of approximately 2.3 million domains with just under 2 million websites. I’ve a .UK ccTLD survey planned for the next few weeks which should cover just over 4 million domains.
Based on the results of the August 20122 web survey .CO ccTLD is largely undeveloped and many of its domains point to PPC and holding pages. This is a classic pre-landrush anniversary pattern that most new TLDs display. However the interesting trends are in the brand protection registrations combined with the external TLD redirects. The external TLD redirects are often small businesses registering their brands or keywords and pointing them to their main website. They accounted for 10.61%. Defensive registrations aren’t limited to the big brands. High profile brands often use specialist registrars and nameservers for their ccTLD registrations. But the small businesses often just register the version of their main brand domain and point it to their main website.
The level of development was low but this is to be expected in a new TLD that was effectively in its first year of operation. The development level in the more established Colombian section (.com.co etc) of the TLD may be higher.
The higher price of the .CO registrations may have cut down on some speculation but the theory of a higher registration fee driving development is a common one. The .CO registry has been pushing development and not relying on just domainers for the momentum. Domaining is part of a successful TLD ecology but you cannot have a successful TLD ecology without development.
I have some notes on building a .CO search engine which would, if I got the time to build it, provide some better insights into the depth and complexity of the .CO web.
@mccormac thank you for clarifying what you;ve done and for sharing your work. i would be curious to read your notes about search engine index construction.
@Johnnie
I just don’t understand people using the words: “never” or “always” with such a certainty. I mean how can you tell or predict the future? As for now there are 2 things “certain”:
1. there is a need for an alternative to .com’s to be developed
2. .co is just an infant -> give it time to grow and to be known by people!