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Thousands of short .co domains available

Kevin Murphy, July 6, 2011, 09:31:44 (UTC), Domain Registries

The .co registry may have sold over a million domains since it launched a year ago, but there may be quite a bit of potentially valuable real estate still available.
.CO Internet said in its registrar newsletter this week that, as of May 31, 51.2% of three-letter domains and 71.1% of three-character combinations were still available.
On the back of the envelope I’m looking at, that works out to about 9,000 three-letter names and about 33,000 three-letter/number domains.
No three-letter domains are available for the basic registration fee in .com.
Three-letter domains are often considered fairly safe investments by domainers, from a cybersquatting risk perspective, but UDRP panelists don’t always agree.
UPDATE: In response to a few skeptical reader comments, I pinged .CO for clarification. It turns out that the quoted percentages include the seven Spanish IDN characters that .CO allows — á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ, ü.
Domains including these strings would presumably be far less appealing to registrants, and not all .co registrars offer IDN characters.
The number of pure ASCII three-letter domains available in .co is presumably much, much lower than my envelope math suggested.

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Comments (5)

  1. chris says:

    i think this is very wrong – i havent seen a lll.co available in a few months – at least one that is worth keeping

  2. em says:

    Hi,
    That’s not correct. There havent been any LLL.co available for a long time. I have done multiple searches.
    Unless the actual registry was holding LLL.co, there are 0 to be registered.

  3. Kevin Murphy says:

    I’m checking the data with .CO and will follow up if I get anything.

  4. I remember I read a blog post about 5 months ago that the registry announced that all lll.co domains were registered…or was it a dream???

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