Beating a Dead Horse (I): .CO

There are 26 valuable domains in the .co extension – the single letter domains.

These are the only domains in .co for which there is not a corresponding .com domain.*  It is no surprise that there is where most of the action is in .co.

For any other domain, I see the .co extension as being the absolutely worst extension – worse than .net, .info, .biz, etc. – because it has no separate identity from .com and is just a pale shadow of it.  Any site built on a .co domain for which a .com domain exists will bleed huge amounts of traffic and ‘mindshare’ to the .com.

I don’t get the .co domain interest.  The .CO registry has done a brilliant job marketing the extension.  But people who think this is the second coming of the .com goldrush are probably going to realize that they’ve been buying fools gold instead.

Time will tell…

* There are a couple of single-letter dot-com domains registered – X.com and Z.com.  It’s possible that Spanish language domains would have local value in Colombia in the .co extension.