Branding Backfire? – .CO URL shorteners
.CO has carved out a niche for itself as the preferred extension for URL shorteners. Google (g.co), Twitter (t.co), GoDaddy (x.co), are now using .co domains as URL shorteners.
Using .co as a URL shorteners has taken one of .co’s defects – that it doesn’t have a separate identity from .com – and turned it into an advantage. By being a ‘nickname’ for .Com, the .Co extension works as a natural URL shortener for longer .Com domains.
t.co is the 22nd most visited site in the US according to Alexa. t.co isn’t a website, however. It isn’t a destination. It is a redirect to a real website, one that probably has a .Com extension.
Because of .co domains’ adoption as URL shorteners, likely 99.99% of the public’s interaction with .Co domains is as a URL shortener.
.Co risks being permanently branded as a redirect, rather than a destination. Someone seeing a .Co domain will think it is a redirect, not a brand in itself.
This will be reinforced as longer domains are being used as redirects. such as the Denver Broncos using dbron.co as a redirect to DenverBroncos.com.
The trend is picking up with JDM Digital selecting JMDr.co as a redirect, the launch of the lnk.co URL shortening service, Virgin with virg.co, Politico with Politi.co, and Venture Hacks with vh.co.
The .CO registry is promoting the use of .co domains as branded shorteners on its Opportunity.co site. I agree that this seems like a good use of the .Co extension, as the brand is retained in a shorter domain. The .Co registry could carve out a nice, profitable niche for itself if .co domains are widely adopted as shorteners.
The risk is that the use of .Co as URL shorteners will drown out the other possible uses promoted by the .Co registry at Opportunity.co, such as using .Co for a company’s web site. There are five companies highlighted on Opportunity.co “company” page. Only one is an established company, the venture capital firm Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson. The promo text is:
DFJ knows what it takes to build a successful company. One of the most important things of all? A solid domain name, like DFJ.CO
Type in DFJ.CO, however, and you are redirected to the corporate web site at DFJ.COM.
Will that increasingly by the fate of .Co domains – to not be sites under their own name but merely redirects to .Com sites?
Apart from those you mentioned, there are big names using their .COs as fully developed websites or mirrors, like Armani.CO, Laney.CO or RollsRoyce.CO (as a side note, RollsRoyce.co.uk and RollsRoyce.net aren’t even resolving for me), not to mention O.co and its ongoing migration to the domain. Even artists are using .COs: if you search for Charlotte Church on Google, CharlotteChurch.CO, the singer’s official website, is second on page 1, while the .com and .co.uk are nowhere to be found (I’m not sure whether she owns them at all).
That said, .com is and will always be the undisputed king, no doubt about that.
Sorry, Armani.CO was a mistake. Anyway there are other popular brands using .CO, like VerizonBusiness.CO, cPanel.CO and others.
cPanel seems to be aliasing the .co, .com, and .net to the same site, with the .net being the primary site.
VerizonBusiness.co is redirecting to the .com site.
VerizonBusiness.co has hundreds of pages indexed by Google and if you access them from Google, the website will stay on .co as an exact mirror of the .com. Anyway, .co is used in many ways, url shortening is only one.
On the plus side my blog is now shows a ton of referrals from t.co so the impact of twitter is pretty dramatic whereas it had been hidden before. On the minus Side it automatically converts the fragerfactor ink on my tweets which leaves no branding for me
if you take look at .co sales you will see that over 90% of domains which were sold for the biggest money were not LLL.co but .co keywords.
Yes, it seems that aside from the single letter domains most of the big money purchases in .co were for keyword domains. What will become of these investments if .CO becomes associated in the public’s mind as a URL shortener? .CO has enough challenges trying to step out from .COM’s shadow, but if the extension is viewed as primarily a redirect, it will make the challenge of building a brand on a .CO site even harder.
Not a big fan of .co but it does make sense with all the smart phones to have a shorter URL. maybe .cc will catch on.
.cc and .to also work well as shorteners. For a shortener it doesn’t matter that much what the extension is. I don’t see people paying a lot more to obtain a .co domain for use primarily as a shortener if the equivalent .cc or .to domain is available for much less. So even if .co catches on as the primary extension for shorteners, it doesn’t mean that this will lead to an increase in their value.
Forget 1-on-1 URL shorteners. Use bundles of Brief.ly and Many.at.
I really don’t see the .CO TTL becoming a branding backfire. It’s far less expensive than more exotic ones out there. It’s close enough to .COM for late-adopters to be comfortable with it. It’s popularized by large organizations using it as their preferred domain name extension, like “O.co.”
The trend, instead, will be away from long, but keyword-rich preferred domain names to short, easy to remember, easy to link via social media, domain names with, perhaps, exotic extensions.
As far as our own, branded URL shortener (JDMr.co, referenced above), that’s just a way of branding our own shortened URL, but we’re not advocating that TTL specifically. In fact, we recommend just finding a crazy-short and cool one. If .CO is available and cheap, why not?
I used to call my Amish.co site EX-Amish.com, till I registered Amish.co and now that is my new brand.
I got excited when .CO became available at $29.97; and now, if we’re lucky, we get it for under $25. I thought the bean counters at extensions ‘R Us were a little $-heavy when they figured the price at approx. $29.97. When I would catch it under $20, I would buy a good KEYWORD domain.
Since reading the hype, and now this write-up about .co being a URL shortener rather than a website in it’s own – I feel disheartened. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that my .co’s will not be used as URL shorteners… I hope to get first page exposure on SERPs.
eMarketMe
and
CoolBeans Domains
Of course, when I thought I successfully registered GraphicDesign.co they said it was then not available… Doh’s!
To people who are not aware that .co is a legit extension, they might think the url is a typo and type in .com instead. That’s what I thought until I researched it further.