Its been just over two years since the .Co TLD launched and we reached out to Nicolai Bezsonoff, the Chief Operating Officer of .CO Internet, SAS the company that operates the .Co ccTLD to see if we could get some solid numbers on renewal rates and registrations.

Not only did we get numbers but we got an interview with Nicolai.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By way of background Nicolai has been with the company since its inception, and was responsible for the transition of the TLD and its successful launch.

Apart from playing a key role defining the company’s corporate strategy, he oversees every aspect of it’s operations, with the primary responsibility of ensuring a secure and reliable experience of the .CO domain to users, customers, and partners.

His claim to fame:  100% uptime… after lots of coffee.

Nicolai brings more than 16 years of experience in technology, operations and product development.

Originally from Colombia, Nicolai was the Director of Technology and Operations for Citigroup in their New York headquarters. In that role he was responsible for defining the technological strategy for the commercial, corporate, and investment banking divisions of the bank – overseeing a large team in New York, London, São Paulo, and Mumbai. Prior to that he held senior roles for Zefer Consulting and Cambridge Technology Partners providing technology strategy and advisory services to global 1000 firms.

Nicolai holds a degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Miami (Yeah, Juan), as well as an MBA from Columbia University and London Business School.

Nicolai It’s been just over two years since the launch of .CO, how is the extension faring?
“Yes, we just celebrated our second birthday.

As it turns out, the “Twos” aren’t so terrible after all.

We’re making solid headway with our target audience, which is focused on startups and growing businesses worldwide.

We’re also seeing more registrations, more great use cases and more excitement about the extension than we had ever expected.  The momentum is very strong.  (Note: .CO released an Infographic a few months ago that gives a summary of .CO’s progress to date).

What are the metrics you use to measure your success?

That’s a great question – and one we spend a huge amount of time considering every day. There’s no quick or simple answer, as it turns out.  We look at several different metrics, starting with development.  First and foremost, we look for use cases by companies in our target market.  To do that, among other things, we created an index of startup accelerators, incubators, and specific media outlets that reach that market.  From there, we look at how many sites in .CO are being mentioned and compare against previous periods.  That gives us a good sense of how things are progressing.

Although a bit less interesting, we also look at the raw number of domain names registered each year, each month and each day – right down to the minute.

Currently we’ve got over 1.35 million domain names registered by people and businesses around the world, largely in the US and Europe.

We also measure and monitor the performance of .CO as compared to all the other domain extensions on the secondary market.

High secondary market values are often thought to be indicative of a strong domain extension.

We were very happy to see the results of Sedo’s recent market study that found that .CO has the second highest average sales prices of all top domain extensions in the Sedo marketplace — second only to .com.

As the .CO extension becomes more widely adopted, developed, monetized and marketed – we think the secondary market for .CO domains will only grow stronger.

What about renewals?  How is .CO performing on that front?

Renewal rates are definitely another key metric we track and monitor closely. We’re now knee deep in our second cycle of renewals – so we’ve been busy analyzing the data. Knock on wood, so far so good.

I think the best way to look at the data is to separate our pre-launch from our post-launch renewal rates.

As we expected, the pre-launch renewal rates are exceptionally high.

This includes domain names acquired during the Grandfather, Sunrise and Landrush phases of our launch process – which took place just prior to our public launch on July 20th, 2010, known as “General Availability”(“GA”).

For domain names acquired after GA, when the general public could register .CO domain names on a first come first serve basis, the renewal rate is still very high — but it’s much more in line with industry standards.

So what exactly are the renewal rates?

For domain names registered pre-GA, renewal rates range from 92% – 97%.

Domains acquired during the Grandfather phase have a 97% renewal rate

Domains acquired during the Sunrise phase have a 96% renewal rate;

Domains acquired during the Landrush phase have a 92% renewal rate.

For domain names acquired after GA, the blended rate of renewal is 62%, which includes the average of first and second time renewals.

Second time renewals are particularly strong, with an average renewal rate of 72%.

Wow, I don’t think I have ever gotten such specific numbers from any registry on renewal rates, you should be really happy with those numbers:

Yes, we’re very happy. The numbers are strong — especially when you consider that they don’t account for multi-year registrations.

When we report renewal rates to the public, we typically don’t consider multi-year registrations – we just look at renewals made by those who have the ability to opt to renew in a given year.  Unfortunately, this tends to drag the percentages down a bit because it excludes all of those committed registrants who opted to register their domain names for 2 to 5 year terms in advance.

Internally we do monitor and measure multi-year registrations, as it allows us to track the total number of domains under management registered in a month against the total number of domain names not renewed for that particular month.  Using this method we end up with an 80.3% renewal rate– which is super strong.

It’s also important to remember that .CO is a very young registry, and renewal rates will tend to trend upwards over time. It’s a fact that the longer someone owns a particular domain name, the more likely they are to renew that domain name over time.  That’s why we see our second time renewal rate is so much higher than our blended first and second year rate. I’m confident we’ll continue to see upward momentum next year – and that our third time renewal rate will be substantially higher still.

There’s been a lot of speculation about the number of “drops” .CO would see following your second anniversary.  Can you give us the details?
So the numbers are in and counted – and the drops were, as they say, “nothing to write home about.” For July-September of 2012, the three months where we expected to have the highest drops of the year (by far), the actual numbers were less than predicted — and were far outweighed by the number of new registrations.  Despite all the speculation, our zone file has not gotten any lighter at all. ”

“We’re now at over 1.35 million domains under management and the extension has never been stronger.”

Can you share the actual number of dropped .Co Domain Names?

“Sorry Mike, I’m afraid I can’t give the specifics. The data would be far too valuable to our competitors (current and future). The only folks with access to that information are our closest partners who have access to our zone file on a daily basis.”

What’s next for .CO?
“We’ve got big plans ahead – and will continue disrupting the status quo in the domain industry.  For now, we’re all heads down and working hard to create a safe, thriving domain – a place where big ideas are being brought to life every day.  You can see lots of examples on our website at http://www.go.co.

We’re also doing some very interesting mining on our own data and should be able to start publishing more of our findings in the coming months.  This is the kind of thing that really gets me excited – databases, cool Excel pivot tables, and watching our numbers grow.”

Thanks Nicolai lets catch up after year three.

Our congrats go out to the .Co team including Juan, Lori Ann and Crystal.