Jul 10
20
Google and Dot Co – Will It Work?
As you may or may not know, dot co (.co) has now finished it’s landrush period and is becoming available to the general public. The question begs, will Google take to dot co in the world wide network? The actual extension is for Columbia, however it is being touted around as the extension for companies (.COmpany). If you own an e commerce site or a large company it may be wise to protect your site and brand by purchasing the dot co version, even if just for type in errors. But is this extension ever going to have a large web presence in search engines and in particular Google?
Well, domain investors will probably not take to them much at all. As not only do they have so much money invested in .com .net and .org (amongst others) but also for the fact that other extension flops like .mobi in recent years have cost active domainers a lot of cash. However the other side of the argument is it is only 1 letter off .com (miss of the “m” typing fast and you could easily land on the .co version). This will probably prompt some domainers to invest in high traffic search terms for the type in value from parking them.
Parking domains however is becoming less and less worthwhile, and the more shrewd domainers now develop small but useful sites to sit on these “parkable type in domains”. This can give good value, but probably only if you are a decent web developer yourself, as the cost of doing this to potentially hundreds (if not thousands) of your domains will never be worthwhile if you are paying people. Causing many domainers to streamline their portfolios a lot lately.
So we come to dot co. Interesting enough is the fact that Google and Microsoft have take up their .co names. And obviously so. There are also many large trademarked companies who have taken up the option in sunrise period, and when looking for many large searched terms in dot co right now, you will find the top ones mostly gone now also. I guess the key to all of this is development. If there are major companies who have now managed to buy the domain name they were always after, but never able to get the .com, then they will throw some weight behind the extension in the form of advertising on TV or around the web. Also if there is a major sale or auction of a dot co in the coming months it may prove that people are seeing the value in them, which in turn Google will too.
Google is developed on what the user wants to get from the internet. Their whole ethos is to create the best web search experience for their users. If that means serving up .co extensions because demand and development of them is increasing then it will happen in my opinion. However, if like .mobi, the extension fails to gather any momentum over the first 6 months to a year, then it could fall spectacularly and be the most talked about thing in domain circles for many years to come.
I have bought 4 .co domains and have bids on some further ones with namejet. I am not going to go crazy and buy up everything I see, but if I get 10 domains all with good development possibility then fine. I have been bitten to often over the years buying worthless domains, and now only buy ones I know could be developed, either by me, or by a possible future owner.
Welcome to the dot co era. Let’s hope it works out, it will be interesting.