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.co deal worth $77 million up for grabs
Kevin Murphy,
March 25, 2025, 18:39:23 (UTC),
Domain Registries
The Colombian government has put the contract to run .co out for bidding, and it looks like the successful registry could make as much as $77 million over the lifetime of the deal.
GoDaddy currently runs .co through its subsidiary .CO Internet, which it acquired when in bought Neustar five years ago. The government’s RFP does not rule out the incumbent reapplying despite some friction in the past.
It’s not simply a back-end registry services deal. The successful registry will have to be the public face of .co too, handling front-of-house services and marketing as well.
Extrapolating from some figures and formulas in the RFP, it seems GoDaddy’s share (19% of the total revenue) has worked out to about $7.7 million a year on average over the last five years. The new contract would be a 10-year deal.
But is .co on the decline? According to the RFP, the were 3,217,570 .co domains in January this year, down from 3.4 million in 2022 and 3.3 million in 2023. Numbers for 2024 were not included.
That downward trend may merely be the post-Covid slump experienced by many TLDs. Indeed, when the current contract was signed in 2020, there were just 2.3 million .co domains under management, so GoDaddy’s done a pretty good job of growing the namespace.
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I think you meant “Colombian government”.
I did. Thanks.