Up 35x on Super Bowl Sunday — .Co Registrations
.Co Internet CEO states .co off to good start but hard work lies ahead.
In a blog post titled “The State of the .CO Domain“, .Co Internet CEO Juan Calle released some numbers regarding the effects of the firm’s Super Bowl commercial tie-in with Go Daddy.
Calle states that sales on Super Bowl Sunday were 35 times as much as a typical Sunday. Traffic to the firm’s Opportunity.co and COinternet.co web sites was up 100x.
Of course we don’t know the base for typical Sunday registrations, but the notable thing is that this momentum continues.
He also stated that .co had a good launch but has a long road ahead of it — pointing down the road 5, 10, or even 20 years:
Frankly, it’s really far too early to pop the champagne corks and party like its 1999. What we have on our hands, folks – is simply a good start. A solid launch.
Calle noted two success metrics that the firm won’t use in a silo: the number of domains registered and aftermarket sales. He notes that they could easily boost the number of domains registered by dropping the price to $1.99. He also thinks that it’s too early in the lifecyle of the domain name to look at aftermarket sales:
I suspect we will need to wait a good 4 or 5 years to see the .CO extension become more widely adopted, developed, monetized and marketed by end-users — and for the following-market to ripen. In my humble opinion, most of the efforts we are seeing today to quickly flip .CO domain names on the secondary market are largely driven by speculation.
Instead, Calle wants to measure .co by “Gross Domain Productâ€:
…measuring not only the total number of .CO registrations, but the number of websites developed, and the broader value of the economic activity happening within the .CO space.
In March .Co will launch a billboard in Times Square and an outdoor advertising campaign in Fresh York City, Austin and San Francisco. I imagine the Austin campaign will be tied into the SXSW Interactive Festival. I’ll keep my eyes open.
