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.CO landrush auctions could top $10 million

Kevin Murphy, September 2, 2010, 19:56:02 (UTC), Domain Sales

The ongoing .co landrush auctions could finish up raising more than $10 million for .CO Internet, according to some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations.
My spreadsheet of reported landrush auction sales currently has 194 rows, based on registry reports and the odd unreported sale that Mike Berkens has been able to dig up.
These sales total $869,599, for an average of $4,482 per domain. Multiply that average by 2,523, which is the number of domains that were originally headed to auction, and you get to $11.3 million.
That may well be an unreliable estimate, of course, for any number of reasons.
For instance, .CO Internet is not reporting sales of porn-themed domains, or domains that may have UDRP issues. These domains could possibly have lower average sales prices.
The registry may also not be reporting other results, such as auctions that wound up with only one bidder for whatever reason, which could also drag down the average.
However, it seems that so far UDRP-risky domains or typos of popular generic domains (such as some of the typos of numerical .coms popular in Asia) have been among the big hitters.
AutoGlass.co, for example, appears to have slipped under the registry’s radar, and has been reported sold for $53,000. AutoGlass is a well-known brand here in the UK. I’ll be interested in seeing who bought it.
If these big prices hold true for other unreported sales of domains with possible trademark issues it could actually raise the average sales price.
Either way, it’s clearly been a successful auction so far.

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Comments (5)

  1. andrew says:

    Interesting that AutoGlass pops out as a trademark to you. Over on this side of the pond I’ve only thought of it as a generic for auto (car) glass.

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      They do advertise on TV quite a lot over here.
      Also, generally over here nobody uses the words “auto” or “automobile” to mean “car”, so one could argue “autoglass” is less generic in a UK context.

  2. ... says:

    lol, and in germany we have the opposite…
    carglass as company with many TV-advertise, but we say “auto” 😉

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