On .Co turning 5 — My thoughts

Driven by good marketing, .Co celebrates success on fifth anniversary.

Five years ago today, on July 20, 2010, the .Co domain name entered general availability.

I remember sitting at a table at the Austin Convention Center during HostingCon, trying to track general reaction to how the domain name launch was going. It certainly looked positive, especially since Overstock had just paid $350,000 for O.co.

Five years later, it’s safe to say .Co is a success. Hands down. The business sold for over $100 million just four years following launching.

But its success was not guaranteed.

On the one hand, “co” is a common abbreviation for firm. It’s also rather similar to .com. This means firms are familiar with it…and they also want to protect their brands in it.

Yet this similarity is also a downside. We’ve all typed .com when we meant to type .co. The similarity is both a blessing and a curse.

I think what made .co successful was an extremely well executed marketing strategy.

.Co realized it wasn’t in the business of converting people from .com to .co. Its opportunity was to tap into fresh firms and offer them a better second level name in .co than they could get in .com.

The branding has worked. Startups often don’t bother finding a good .com domain, and instead get a .co.

Even in an increasingly crowded field of .com alternatives, .co stands out. I spoke with an entrepreneur this weekend who hasn’t been able to secure his name in .com. He registered many other variations: .co, .me, and at least one of the fresh top level domain names.

For now, he’s using the .co instead of the others.

.Co’s marketing has been well executed and, frankly, ballsy. Not many firms would make a bet on the Super Bowl, but that’s what .Co did when it paid a lot of cash to be featured in GoDaddy’s Super Bowl ads.

Regardless of where you slot .co in terms of the domain name hierarchy, it is certainly the most successful “rebrand” of a country code domain name to date. I’d also slot it well above names like .biz, .info and .me.

There are 1.8 million .co names registered. 12 single letter domains have been purchased (some for seven figures) by the likes of Twitter and Google. Anyone who follows the startup world sees fresh firms launching on .co daily.

When these firms raise tens of millions, will they go following the matching .com? It’s likely. But there’s no doubt that .co has become an acceptable alternative to .com in the entrepreneur community.

Happy birthday, .Co.