Domain Owl

I have to obey my conscience and speak out about .Co. I do not believe its appeal warrants the onslaught of spending the major tld sponsors have thrown its way, nor do I believe any name has the resale potential of a dot com, with very major exceptions.

From time to time hidden values in domaining can crop up, but I do not think .co is one of them. The default placement of Godaddy’s of .co as the first choice was a laughably transparent action, but not a useful one for me as a Godaddy customer.

If you aren’t hearing this message from other domainers, bloggers, registrars, and online experts, consider the source. The promotion and marketing bandwagon has been out for .co for quite some time. The dot-co ccTLD properly denotes a Colombian entity or site. But what SEO value does .co offer customers? I have yet to see any .CO name smack the Google, Bing, or Yahoo search indices with a whammy.

Godaddy and many other registrars want you to know they love .co. Where did the need to puff up the Columbian domain market come from? This might have something to do with the fact that ICANN held its major conference there recently, and to get the big domain sponsor money behind .co, it had to make a case for prevalence of .co resales. Except I do not see the level of interest in .co legitimizing any investment.

Most registrars do not even support .co in their premium auction resales and registrar support sales programs. That’s a big hint right there. Maybe big portfolio buyers want to take a risk, and maybe copyright holders to better TLD’s and guardians of trademark protection want the coverage. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Every day another UDRP or WIPO case makes the news. This (insert your country name of choice here) is suing the owners of that one (insert generic name with other ccTLD) for rights. So there really isn’t a new market for fresh .co names, because the law in domains right now basically protects the original dot com domain name holder from any cross-TLD squatting.

One has to do a lot of evangelizing when marketing and selling a domain name, and the heavy lifting of breaking in new domainers doesn’t get easier with the .co hornswoggle. The unwieldy cargo of the dot.co cause is an unnecessary one. The Super Bowl commercials and Joan Rivers aside, where is the long term investment value? For me, currently .co is a speculative buy.

But so many big names have hopped on the .co bandwagon, you might say. Yes, and they all have connections to a very tight network of big dollar, deep pocket domain buyers who may one day be looking at one of their five figure names on the auction block and want the very best of intentions coming their way. These domainers can afford to splash out big. But Mr. Small Biz or Mr. Weekend/Hobby Domainer doesn’t need to drink that Kool Aid.

Maybe this isn’t the right economy to furnish domainers with a flabby TLD that can’t carry its own weight. Too much spin and in-your-face promotion simply emphasizes for me how much I don’t want a .co domain name. But to say that .co pre-empts dot com for domain lookup and selection is horse puckey. This TLD may have its day, but that day has not yet come.

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