On its birthday, .co has a 66% renewal rate
Two thirds of .co domain names due to expire in July were renewed, according to the registry.
In its monthly newsletter, .CO Internet said that its renewal rate was 66%.
A company spokesperson confirmed that this figure is for the entire month, which includes the July 20 one-year anniversary of the repurposed ccTLD going into general availability.
What this essentially means is that about one in three .co domain names registered for a year during the initial landrush a year ago were allowed to expire last month.
According to HosterStats, which categorizes over half a million .co domains according to how they’re being used, about 73,000 .co domains – roughly 13% of the total – are now classified as expired.
.CO Internet says it has over one million registered domains.
If the company was publicly traded, investors and analysts would be looking to the renewal rate as an indication of the financial health of the company.
VeriSign typically reports a .com/.net renewal percentage in the low-to-mid 70s. If .co has a similar ratio, that’s not necessarily positive.
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Kevin
Based on past experiences it’s the 2nd anniversary when it starts to get really interesting.
Michele
Explain.
Agree with Michele — first year of a domain name will see significantly more abandonment than second or third year. Once someone has owned a domain name for a while, they are much less likely to give it up. This is actually a very positive result for .CO in my opinion.
A lot of junk gets dropped at the first anniversary and then reregistered by people who think that they can dump it on PPC again. Often they are just working on a smaller level than the larger PPC operators. However the high price of .co registrations has meant that there hasn’t been the large scale PPC and landgrabs that were seen in .eu ccTLD.
The worst case for COINTERNET would be the development of a recurring Landrush drop spike as in .eu. ( http://www.hosterstats.com/eu-domain-name-registrations.php ) Most of the newer TLDs have managed to get a lot of the junk registrations out of their zones in the first and second year as with the .asia sTLD ( http://www.hosterstats.com/Domain-Landrush-Graph-asia.php ).
It is still a bit early to say if .co’s Landrush renewal rate is a success because a Landrush can last about three months before the TLD reaches a steady-state new registration pattern. Therefore the next few months will be interesting. The registry’s policy of reserving what it considers High Value Keyword domains (3400 or so identified) has meant that it is not a typical Landrush anniversary drop.
Kevin
John has covered it pretty well.
Which is why the 2nd anniversary is key.
It’s only at that stage that you can really see what’s actually going on
Michele
Now that Yahoo has capped earnings on parked .co domain names its all downhill from here. The extension is occupied mostly by speculators who will see no upside to parking which should lead to a mass exodus. Was fun while it lasted but hype can only take one so far.