.CO – A Promising Future Ahead?

in Domain Names Entrepreneurship Tech News by Francis Simisim — March 13, 2010 at 11:59 PM | 1 comment

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.CO is one of the domain extensions that has been buzzing around the domaining industry lately. .CO domain is one of the new extensions that has been approved by ICANN and is launching in April 2010. There are many speculations as to how .CO will turn out, but many believe it will be a huge success. FYI: .CO domains are the ccTLD of Columbia but is made globally available with the approval of the Columbian Government.

.CO is Globally launching for trademark holders on April 26 – June 10, 2010 to register their exact match domains. Then on June 21 to July 13, 2010, Landrush starts and premium .CO domains will be auctioned off to those who are interested. On July 20, 2010, .CO will be available to the general public and will be available to different domain registrars like GoDaddy.

Will .CO domains be the future?

What I personally like about .CO is that it is shorter than .COM (1 letter can mean a huge difference to traffic in mistypes), which makes it easier to remember. The abbreviation CO somehow means company or corporation than .COM, people have associated .COM for more on internet and websites. Imagine if you can own Business.co or Sex.co, how much spill over type in traffic do you believe you can generate without effort? However, it’s not all sunshines and rainbows for those who’ll get into it. You’ll find that somehow .COM trademark holders are going to contest ownership through UDRP, just like what they did with .CM. Also SEO might be a huge challenge, I’m not sure whether Google will recognize that .CO is a global domain than a ccTLD, that means you’ll be ranked more in Columbia as opposed to the global search results. I believe the future is still very cloudy for this domain, I’m a bit biased with trademark issues and that’s what I believe makes or breaks a domain extension.

The biggest challenge for .CO is basically making sure that people who registered or buy their domains aren’t going to lose over trademark problems. .COM has established its ground and is the king of the domain world, and that’s what really the hurdle that .CO has to really get over. If they can then, it could be a huge success, if not then it’ll just be just another ccTLD. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes, it seems like a huge promise but we all have to wait and see how it all turns out.

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