I measure my “care” factor for my domains using the amount of Whois Checks/Searches on each particular domains. Once or twice a month I use the Godaddy export tool (Whois Export Instructions) to create a list of data regarding my domains and one of them is the weekly and monthly Whois checks on all of my domains. Out of the 350 domains I own in my two accounts, of the 10 domains that did not get a search this month, 3 of them were my dot co domains. The only three I own at the moment.
I do like the dot co domains I own. I purchased all of them for reasonable prices and since I am one of the owners of a company that removes stumps, a stump company, thus stump.co. For the other two I figured I would try out a couple of common word domains and see how they did. They haven’t done well in the “do people care” category. As I stated earlier, 340 of the other domains had at least 1 whois lookup. Some not many, but something. The other 7 that drew blanks were names I really didn’t expect to have too whois searches. A couple plant names dot org that I purchased for keyword value but aren’t parked and some local geo alternate tlds that also aren’t parked.
I mention parked because parked domains or domains that are visible, will get more attention. When a person sees that domain they are more likely to want more information about it. Auctions will have the same effect. These domains have been parked since day one yet nobody seemed to want to know more. To me this says as much about the extension as it does about these particular domains. That it doesn’t have the “care” value of other top extensions. I certainly think they have value or I wouldn’t have purchased them, but this further supports my thought that it will take more work and more effort to find the right buyer for my dot co domains than my dot com,net,and orgs. One may think that dot info would be comparable to dot co is “care” value but I don’t have but one dot info and it has a site on it so I don’t have an apples to apples comparison. I also think dot info has made a bit of a resurgence in prices and is very easy to rank with good information on the site.
Some may say I am drawing too much of a conclusion from three domains. Mike Mann seems to be moving names. Throw Mann out of the mix and the sales numbers haven’t been real strong. While it doesn’t mean that sales won’t get better. it means that you might as well get to know your dot cos a little better. They’re probably going to be staying with you a while.
Shane,
I am very surprised that I have done so well with my .co names. I hand registered 13 names when they opened up and sold one in the first year. I have only sold three of them but they total up to $3,800. Two of them were on GoDaddy premium listings and a guy contacted me about the other one so I have almost zero time in these. Not bad for a $390 investment.
Garry,
Since we’ve done business together I know you make solid investments. Any chance you share a/the names. Always curious what type of names are selling.
Will be interesting to see how many searches are done after the .co commercial. That is a nice function on the godaddy back office.
We only carry about 15 .co names, Tablets.co being the best one by miles.
We average about 3 offers a month. Have had many multiple offers in 5 fig range but this was not a hand reg. FYI- Most of all the offers are not from US.
I think most .co names now will be bought outside of US. .Com in US is going to stay on top for many years regardless of how many ext come out. But .co will def be a great investment for companies outside of the US.
Donny
The Godaddy Whois export tool is the single most important tool I use: and I couldn’t agree more that its the best way to see how many people actually ‘care’ about your individual holdings.
.co has not got the typo traffic everyone thought it would, I purchased some very highly quality 3l .co’s, in the first few months, I got some random xxx offers, but I thought I hold onto them. As many were registered in mid july, there were many good names that dropped, the prices they were being bought at weren’t out of this world, I think it is beat up right now, and they did such a damn good job marketing them, but end users still have not picked up on them.
Neat little tool.
My few .CO’s that I do own have the least amount of Whois searches, zero.
The ones with the most were definitely .com with a surprising .us in the mix.
Thanks for sharing.
Nick
.co fa sho
That particular utility on godaddy doesn’t always seem to be accurate with non-Verisign TLDs.
I have a couple .us domains with them- knew they had been getting whois lookups, deliberately executed a few myself, sure enough, the list still showed them as having none.
.co is still garbage, it wouldn’t shock me if they were indeed getting no whois lookups, but perhaps the utility doesn’t register them right?
I own lots of .co’s as well as .com’s and sell more .co’s eventhough they are less popular as far as WHOIS searches are concerned.
Yesterday I bought reimbursement.co for regular price although it is getting harder to find a basic key word that’s still available.
I invite You to check my domains out at http://www.mostintelligent.com
best regards
Jacek
ps. What I’ve noticed is that most of .co’s are sold through the SEDO’s service so if You wanna know what they sell for just go there. My highest sofar is LAguide.co sold for USD500
Shane,
They were OLEDs.co, Wicker.co, and ChurchOfGod.co.
@Ron- no end-user will pick up on the .co market. It’s a junk extension.
o.co is the best example. Run for the hills and liquidate because this extension is a lose-lose with no end-user ever putting real $ into this space.
The .co registry’s marketing director should be given the “Marketing of the year,” award!
If a LLL.com company really wanted you little LLL.co, which they don’t. then they’ll throw a UDRP at you and look at the win-loss column for .co with UDRPs.
I have some really great .co`s but most of them do not have any whois checks.
I have other .com, .net not so good but many of them have whois searches.
I have been watching .co since they started and I see now very clearly that they are far from people`s attention which they had at the beginning.
I still stand firm on my belief that .co domains are a horrible idea to develop. There is some money to be made in buying and selling just the domains themselves in the near future, but I’d much rather save my cash for good .coms.
Godaddy and company are just trying to keep profits up by pushing new extensions such as .co like they are gold, but it is such a bad idea for businesses to use .co for the simple fact that many people will just type in .com.
I would never ever ever develop a .co domain.
Hi Shane,
Sedo just released our 2011 Domain Market Study and we actually saw a strong increase in .co domain name sales prices. The extension has been gaining value over time in Sedo’s marketplace, and it made the top ten list for our most frequently sold TLDs last year. So there is certainly statistical data to prove that .co names are selling more and at higher prices.
Daniel @ Sedo