Neustar pays $109 million for .CO Internet

Four years after relaunching the Colombian ccTLD .co as a global top-level domain, .CO Internet has been acquired by its long-time partner Neustar for $109 million.
The .co registry will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Neustrar, which already runs .biz and .us, following the close of the deal.
.CO recorded revenue of $21 million in 2013, of which Neustar took $4 million as its back-end registry provider, according to Neustar.
The .co zone currently stands at about 1.6 million names, according to the companies. That seems to mean it added roughly 200,000 net new names in 2013, judging by its 2012 numbers.
The company relaunched .co in 2010, having jointly bid with Neustar for a Colombian government contract.
It was the last truly impressive TLD launch, with 200,000 registrations on day one and over 1 million in its first year.
While the space is still stuffed with speculators, unlike some other TLDs .co is also widely, visibly used by its intended audience — start-ups and entrepreneurs.
.CO is known primarily for its marketing acumen — some new gTLD registries could learn a thing or two — which Neustar CEO Lisa Hook raised as a selling point in today’s press release:

By combining .CO Internet’s innovative domain marketing capabilities with Neustar’s distribution network and technical resources, we will be able to broaden our registry services and the .co brand worldwide, while creating shareholder value.

Neustar expects the deal to close within a month.

.CO Internet looking for more registrars

.CO Internet is expanding its registrar channel with a new Request For Proposals.
The company wants would-be registrars to respond with the commitments they’re willing to make to market and promote .co domains, particularly in markets where .co is not currently popular.
Only ICANN-accredited registrars need apply.
Amusingly, registrars also need to be specifically accredited to sell .biz domains. Presumably this is due to .CO’s relationship with back-end provider Neustar, which also runs .biz.
The company has about 30 registrars right now, but many of those operate very large reseller networks, so there’s no shortage of places to buy a .co if you want one.
.CO deliberately kept its registrar numbers low — only 10 at launch — in order to cut down on abuse and to keep a tighter leash on gaming during the 2010 landrush process.
The RFP can be found here.

Go Daddy claims half-boobed Super Bowl ads success

Go Daddy reckons its two commercials broadcast in the US during the Super Bowl last night were the most successful in the company’s history, according to two key metrics.
The company said in a press release:

Last night’s ads delivered more new customers and more overall sales, as compared to any other Super Bowl campaign in the company’s history.

Go Daddy has been advertising during the game for nine years. This year was the third in which is has partnered with .CO Internet, the .co registry, on one of the ads.
One of the ads was shameless, vintage, attention-grabbing Go Daddy — primarily comprising a lingering shot of a passionate kiss between an attractive female model and a male geek archetype.
The other, which advertised .co, largely eschewed mammary glands in favor of the “Underpants Gnomes” theory of domain name advertising, in which registering a domain somehow leads to fabulous wealth.
ICM Registry used a similar tactic in its launch advertising late 2011.

The Super Bowl is the season finale of a little-played fringe sport known as “American Football”.
Viewers of the annual US broadcast traditionally pay special attention to the regular commercial interludes because the brief, fleeting moments of actual sport are so soul-sappingly tedious.

.co sees DUM grow by a quarter, renewals dip to 63%

.CO Internet said that domains under management in its .co TLD has grown by 24.39% so far in 2012, standing at about 1.4 million at the end of November.
In a blog post last week, the repurposed Colombian ccTLD registry also said that its “blended renewal rate” for the last few months is roughly 63%.
That’s down slightly from the 66% that .CO reported on its first general availability anniversary in July 2011.
Second-year renewals are higher, in the mid-70s, according to the company.
About 93% of its DUM are second-level .co domains, the rest are mostly Colombia-targeted .com.co names.

Blacknight dumps .ie from free domain program, replaces it with .co

Blacknight Solutions has dropped its local ccTLD, .ie, from the free domain name program it offers in partnership with Google to Irish small businesses.
It’s being replaced with .co, the repurposed Colombian ccTLD, which has been getting an indecent amount of traction in regional projects targeting small business recently.
“Unfortunately, while we may be the market leader for .IE, we feel that the restrictions on the domain impose too many restraints to benefit program participants,” Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon said.
Supporting the highly restrictive ccTLD was imposing too many costs and headaches, Neylon said. The company will continue to sell the domains, just not through the program.
Blacknight, Google and the Irish postal service have been offering companies a free year domain registration and hosting under the banner of Getting Business Online for over a year.
In May, Blacknight reported that in the first year only about 21% of companies participating in the program chose .ie.
The .co domain is of course unrestricted.
It’s another regional win for .CO Internet, which markets .co as the TLD of choice for startups.
Just last week .CO Internet announced that Startup Britain, a private-sector entrepreneurial campaign backed by the UK government, had switched from a .org to a .co.

Blacknight now .co accredited

Irish registrar Blacknight Solutions has been approved as a .co registrar, according to the company.
It’s one of the ongoing second wave of .co registrars following the initial 10 used by .CO Internet at launch.
Judging by .CO’s web site, Blacknight will be the 18th registrar to get approval to sell directly (13th if you don’t count the jointly owned registrars on the list), as well as the smallest.
Previously, the company was like so many others a reseller of My.co, the Colombian channel-oriented registrar.

O.co loses 61% of its traffic to O.com

Overstock.com’s decision to rebrand itself O.co had a disastrous effect on the internet retailer’s traffic, according to its CEO.
Patrick Byrne told financial analysts yesterday that “O.co was my bad call” and that “about eight out of 13 people who were trying to visit us through O.co, eight were typing O.com”
It’s not clear what the source of the data is, or why the measurement given was out of 13, but it works out to 61%.
Byrne noted that people may have typed o.co instead after figuring out that o.com doesn’t work – it’s currently reserved, alongside most other single-letter .com domains, by Verisign.
His comments came as Overstock reported 2011 revenue down 3% to $1.05 billion and fourth-quarter revenue down 10% to $314 million.
Byrne said on a conference call with analysts:

There were some bad decisions for which I take responsibility in marketing O.co. O.co was odd in that it worked on one level. It did get out there into people’s heads, but what we discovered, and we turned it up slowly and we actually had nice adoption from the beginning of last year, gradually people shifting to O.co and then, but we got into the Christmas season and it worked terribly for people who were not familiar with us. There was a tremendous amount of traffic diverting to O.com and I think we’ve figured out that it was about eight out of 13 people who were trying to visit us through O.co, eight were typing O.com. Now some of them may have come, trying anyway.

The company bought o.co from registry .CO Internet for $350,000 in July 2010, during the .co relaunch. It later said it would rebrand the company on its new domain.
It even bought the naming rights to the Oakland Coliseum, which is now known as the O.co Coliseum.
Until quite recently, Overstock was an important .CO Internet reference customer. Now, I’m guessing, not so much.
Overstock has “slowed” its rebranding, reverting to referring to o.co as a “shortcut” rather than its primary address, which remains overstock.com.
The company bought o.info last year and this week launched the site as an information portal for its products. It also operates o.biz as a business-to-business site.

Startup America obtains s.co and offers free .co domains to entrepreneurs

Startup America, an initiative to encourage entrepreneurship in the US, has relocated to S.co and will offer a free one-year .co domain registration to registered members.
For .CO Internet, the .co registry, this is a pretty sweet marketing coup.
The Startup America Partnership is a private initiative created a year ago in response to White House calls for grassroots economic stimulus.
It’s chaired by former AOL chief Steve Case, and has over a billion dollars in support commitments from tech heavyweights such as IBM, Intel and HP.
Signing up to the program grants entrepreneurs resources such as discounted accounting software and access to workshops. Now, they’ll also get a free .co domain for a year, if they want one.
As part of the deal, Startup America, which was located at startupamericapartnership.org, can now be found at s.co.
While .CO has been commanding prices for single-letter .co domains of, anecdotally, over a million dollars, I’d be surprised if any significant money has changed hands here.
For a Colombian TLD to become part of a flag-waving American initiative such as this, giving it access to its core target customer base… well, let’s just say that even if it gave away s.co for free, which I think it probably did, it would still be a very smart deal from .CO’s end.

.me beating .co in start-ups?

The .co top-level domain may have more registrations, but more tech start-ups are opting for .me domain names, according to an informal study.
Doctoral student Thomas Park compiled a list of 1,000 start-ups added to TechCrunch’s CrunchBase database last year and found that entrepreneurs chose .co 1% of the time, versus 1.7% for .me.
As caveats, the difference between the two TLDs only works out to seven companies and .me, which launched in 2008, does of course have a two-year head start over .co.
I’m also guessing that CrunchBase has an English-language bias, which could skew the results. While .co has meaning in more countries it lacks the call-to-action punch of .me in English.
Nevertheless, I think the results are interesting because .CO Internet heavily targets start-ups in its marketing and currently has twice as many domains under management (over 1.1 million) as doMEn, the Afilias/Go Daddy joint-venture .me registry.
Park’s results show that .me had a 0.50% share in 2010 and a 0.80% share in 2009 while .co managed to get one company (0.10%) on the list during the half of 2010 it was live.
The survey found that .com is the runaway first choice for entrepreneurs, with about 85% of the start-up market, but you knew that already.

Go Daddy to advertise .co at the Super Bowl

Go Daddy plans to advertise .co domain names during the Super Bowl broadcast for the second year in a row.
The company has bought two 30-second slots during the show, one of which will plug .co and will feature celebrity spokesmodels Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels.
Scripts for both ads have been approved by NBC censors already, Go Daddy said.
It will be the eighth consecutive year the company has advertised during the inexplicably popular sporting event, which had a record-breaking 111 million US viewers this February.
The 2011 ad revealed Joan Rivers, her head spliced onto the body of a much younger glamor model, as the .co Go Daddy Girl.
I estimated at the time that .CO Internet took roughly 30,000 to 50,000 extra registrations due to the Super Bowl commercial.