Risk In .CO – Blind Faith or Informed Decision?
July 22, 6 Comments - Author: Simon Johnson
How was it for you? For me, I’m coming from a standpoint of constructive feedback based on an assessment of RISK. People appreciate that. Why? Because its not “blind faith”, which is what we have seen from many people (aside from greed).
It’s easy for people to be critical about .co – after all, they have been burned by other extensions. On the flip side, most people are ignorant. They just dont know the facts before they jump in. That may sound harsh, but its just reality.
Risk is something 99.9% of bloggers and domainers don’t talk about. I believe its largely because they dont REALLY understand it. Yes, its easy for me to sit back and say that, particularly with many years of Risk Management experience…. but its true. Sure, buying domains has an element of risk; as such many people are exposed to it. Whether they realise or not is another matter.
In terms of .CO – Francois summed it up perfectly in a comment – “People play lottery when they know their sale chance is almost null“.
Many .co buyers are now saying that they are just speculating and are prepared to spend their $$$ on buying .co. That’s completely fine! Good on them. They deserve the rewards.
What Is .CO Anyway?
1. Its still Colombia. The bottom line is that you can put lipstick on a pig, but its a still a pig. Perhaps in this case a flying pig? (Twitter joke) 
That’s not to say its bad. It is what it is. IF I was to register a .co – it would be something relevant to the country. eg: coffee.co. This is because Colombia is a major exporter of coffee. Get the idea?
2. Using .co for company is a “domain hack”. Just like Tonga is .to. Ultimately, its whatever the public thinks it is! That is where the advertising $$$ will help to shift public opinion. Watch out for this.
3. Unfortunately, .CO presents an opportunity for typosquatting. This is something I really DONT support. Its not a sustainable business; if you are doing this, you will end up in a lot of trouble.
I’d also note that typosquatting is not unique to .CO. We have seen it with .cm for Cameroon and .om for Oman.
Changing The Way People See .CO
The money spent on marketing .co has not been disclosed, but it has been described as unprecedented.
The really interesting thing will be IF search engines decide to change their algorithms to reflect .CO being global and not just for Colombia. We haven’t seen that for any other ccTLD, so why should we see it for .CO ? I wonder how much $$$ is being spent on that? How many lobbyists have been descending on Mountain View? How many are still to come in the next few weeks/months?
There have been some rumblings about changing algorithms with a Google spokesperson saying:.
“We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools.“
Its still early days, so lets wait and see. If the search engines do change (and there is no precedent to indicate that they will), then .CO might just be the landgrab people have been wishing for!
If you bought a .co, good luck with it! Seriously. You took the risk, you deserve the reward.
If you have a .CO, I’d love to hear from you. What do you have planned? Flip, develop, hold? Feel free to post a comment and let me know.
Previous | Next Post:
« You’re Not Seriously Buying A .co Are You? | Supreme Court Rules On Australian Style vs auDA »
Facebook comments:
That Google message said clearly that they are going to consider .co as a global TLD.
So let’s all rejoice, fellow risk takers!
I personally registered 10 .co’s, based on the fact that they are spending a lot of money marketing it, unlike what the .mobi and .biz people did.
I think its waste of money, you will see 80 percent drop this year. lol.
The trick was only get typo names, why wud u spend \$$$$$$ building domain that will lose traffic to .com , if u have .com , then building a site on .co, and then people mistype .com, and since u own the .com, u can park it and make money by building .co of your .com
if you dont own .com, i wud not develop the .co
Also, only traffic name worth it, and .co is just marketing on blogs, and forums, and this kind of marketing is indeed to only domainers who buy domains LOL…..this will not get anywhere, if the marketing is only done to domainers, and they will buy and they will regret.
They need to market it outside this scope, which they know not worth, since, no one one will buy .co and they wont make money. they only marketing to domainers, to make them buy this year. and make money off them.
If you are developer, i wud not buy domains .co for development. JUST MY 2 CENTS.
WASTE OF MONEY!! I i will come back after 1 year on this article, and u can prove me wrong, i will give u dollar.
so u can buy a koolaid, and think before u buy these extensions, and they are marketing to domainers, always remember the trick guys!
Good article. I see Domaining.com is full of bloggers who are writing about the wonderful virtues of .co and how .com has now got competition! (Since when hasn’t it?)
In the financial world, we call this: “Talking your own book.” The .co evangelists appear to be trying to convince themselves publicly that their new .co domains will perform – and – even more meagerly – trying to get any gentle reader to agree with them.
To .co I say: “.biz, .cc, .info, .me” The more flavors that are out there, the better the .com homeroom looks.
I purchased two .co domains that I plan on developing. Although I’m not totally sure with what yet. I registered unk.co & unknown.co. I possibly want to keep them related to http://unknownfilms.com somehow. I’m looking forward to seeing what they have to offer
Wow…thanks for the heads up. This is so great…now I can own some premium domain names…I just bought an amazing premium domain home-for-sale.co Hope this is a good investment.
I think your point about being educated and knowing why you are investing in the .co is most critical.
From an seo perspective any domain name that is not geo targeted or a country level domain can be ranked with the appropriate level of link building.
I don’t particularly care about people typing in the domain name and choosing the .com because I base my outcomes on competing for traffic in SEO so really it’s the rankings, relevant traffic and conversions that are important to me.
Why I bought some exact match .co’s was simply because there was some discussion that these might get treated as TLD’s and non country specific domains. If this is the case then my exact match .co’s will benefit from google’s current favorable treatment of exact match domains.
And of course you should always be testing.
Cheers
Ed