If 41% of .co is parked, how many domains will expire today?

Today is the one-year anniversary of the .co top-level domain entering general availability.
As you may recall, .co got off to a flying start, selling about 100,000 names in its first half hour and over 200,000 registrations during its first day.
The question is: how many of those domains will start expiring today and drop over the next few months?
A recent HosterStats survey, from June 1, apparently found that approximately 41% of the 593,622 .co domains it was able to detect were presumed parked.
The survey was not exhaustive, as .CO Internet reports over one million registered .co domains today, and HosterStats acknowledged that its breakdown may differ from the actual numbers.
Still, the data suggests that .co is likely just as heavily speculated as other TLDs, and that some short-term speculators will let their domains expire over the coming days and weeks.
HosterStats’ John McCormac wrote in a comment on an earlier DI post:

What typically happens just after a Landrush anniversary is that the percentage of PPC in a new TLD falls as many speculative domains that could not be flipped or monetised are dropped. The developed websites percentage increases but getting development started in a new TLD is a slow process and takes a few years.

Of course, .CO Internet is all about encouraging development. It has pumped millions into marketing the TLD as somewhere for entrepreneurs to get a good name for their sites.
But with a substantial base of speculative registrations, it seems inevitable that .CO is going to take a hit today, as the first-wave land-grab begins to die out.
I’m not sure whether this will massively impact the number of domains .CO Internet reports, however.
My estimate is that .co currently stands at over 1.1 million domains. It grew from around 600,000 in late December to one million in May, according to registry publicity.
Even if it starts to lose tens of thousands of speculative domains this week, I don’t think .CO will have to stop saying it has more than a million registrations any time soon.
The company does not publish its exact numbers. Chief executive Juan Calle has stated that he thinks registration volume is a poor metric for judging the “success” of a TLD.
UPDATE: The original version of this article stupidly used the word “drop” quite a lot, when “expire” was the more correct word.

Go Daddy and Joan Rivers win .CO awards

The .co registry .CO Internet has announced the winners of its inaugural Bulby Awards, given out to the best .co sites.
Key registrar partner Go Daddy won an award (for x.co), as did the companies’ joint Super Bowl spokesmodel Joan Rivers (for joan.co).
Go Daddy’s Bulby was for the Best Use Of A Single Letter Domain. It beat Twitter (t.co) and Overstock (o.co). Rivers beat the singer Charlotte Church for Best Personal Site.
Sociable.co beat domain blogger Elliot Silver (bahamas.co) to the Best Content award.
The winners were tallied up from votes submitted online, .CO said. The results can be found here.
Afilias does something similar for .info domains every year, but its awards have cash prizes.

Yawn… Google buys shortcut g.co for millions

Do I have to write another 19 of these stories?
.CO Internet has announced the sale of the domain name g.co to Google. It will be used – shock! – as a URL shortener for Google’s services.
While the selling price has not been disclosed, I believe the starting bid for single-character .co domains is around $1.5 million. I expect Google will have paid more.
Google said on its official blog that only Google will be able to create g.co short links and they’ll only redirect to Google sites, unlike goo.gl, which is its customer-facing shortening service.
This is excellent news for .CO, of course. It gets yet another super-high-profile anchor tenant that will spread .co links (and, hopefully for the company, awareness) around the web like a virus.
Amazon acquired a.co, z.co and k.co, Overstock is of course now known as O.co, Go Daddy got x.co and Twitter is using t.co as its official URL shortener.
By my reckoning, that leaves another 19 one-letter .co names to sell. The registry’s windfall could quite easily amount to a year’s revenue for just 26 registrations.
That’s not including the numbers, of course.
Speaking of numbers, .CO also announced today that Silicon Valley incubator 500 Startups is to use 500.co, instead of 500startups.com, as its official domain.
Entrepreneurs, not URL shorteners, are .CO’s target market, vital for its longevity, so it was a very smart PR move to combine these two customer wins into one announcement.

Go Daddy dominant in .co domains

Go Daddy is responsible for more than one third of all .co domain name registrations, according to new research from HosterStats.
HosterStats has managed to track down 616,227 .co domains, and found in its first .co report that 32.69% of them point to domaincontrol.com, Go Daddy’s primary name server doman.
Another two Go Daddy domains, secureserver.net and cashparking.com, handle 3.89% and 3.42% of known .co domains, the report says.
The registry, .CO Internet, does not publish its zone files, so HosterStats does not have stats covering the over one million .co domains that have been registered.
Still, it’s a pretty decent sample size, and probably a reasonably reliable guide for estimating Go Daddy’s .co market share.
It’s pretty much in line with Go Daddy’s overall market share, and comes as little surprise given joint marketing initiatves such as this year’s Super Bowl commercial.
Sedo’s sedoparking.com was the second-largest .co host, with 5.21% of the names.
Tallying up percentages from name servers exclusively associated with parking services, it appears that at least 10% of .co is parked.
I suspect the real number to be much larger.

DomainMonster gets .co accreditation

DomainMonster has announced that it’s the first UK-based domain name registrar to get a .co accreditation.
The partnership comes as .CO Internet expands its registrar channel beyond the initial 10 that were approved when it launched a year ago.
The registry announced in April that it would add 20 new registars over the next 12 months.
DomainMonster has been selling .co domains as a reseller of Colombian registrar Domino Amigo for the last year.
The company says did a pretty brisk trade on the first day of .co availability, securing more .co names in the first 10 minutes than any other registrar, with a 90% success rate.
I’ve heard from a few places recently that Go Daddy may have even asked DomainMonster to submit launch-day registrations on its behalf.
The company also has a new reseller platform of its own, DomainBox, which will also make .co domains available to partners.

Thousands of short .co domains available

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.

Overstock becomes .co’s anchor tenant from heaven

Overstock.com is to slap its new brand, O.co, on the Oakland Raiders stadium in California, bringing yet more exposure to the .co top-level domain.
The company bought the stadium naming rights back in April, and was pushed into the rebranding now because the sign needs to go up, according to AdAge.
Presumably, whenever American football fans tune into a broadcast or read the sports pages, they’re now going to be exposed to the .co brand.
Not many TLDs have that claim to fame. According to Wikipedia, the only other stadium in the US currently named after a domain is the Jobing.com Arena in Glendale, Arizona.
Overstock has been so good for .CO Internet’s marketing, it’s easy to forget that the company actually paid for the domain, splashing out $350,000 a year ago.
I’d hazard a guess that if the registry had known just how prolific the O.co brand would become, it would have given the name away for free.
Currently, the domain o.co redirects to overstock.com, but the site logo refers to “O.co, also known as Overstock.com”.

A million .co domains registered

At some point over the last few weeks the one millionth .co domain was registered, approximately ten months after the domain names became generally available.
That’s pretty good going (better than I expected) when compared to other large-scale TLD launches, such as .mobi, which took almost five years to hit the same milestone.
Registry .CO Internet has been marketing .co domains hard for the last 12 months, particularly in California, where it is focused on attracting Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
To turn the one million milestone into a marketing event, the company has also released some customer endorsement videos at a new site, UnderTheBulb.co (which it’s advertising in my sidebar).
Whether the rapid growth is sustainable is now the question. The one-year anniversary of .co’s launch is coming up in late July, and we might expect a number of early speculative registrations to expire.
But .CO Internet seems confident that it won’t see much of a blip, as its numbers suggest that the vast majority of its registrants – reportedly north of 80% – own fewer than 10 domains each.
Chief executive Juan Calle joked that the company had considered a marketing campaign to coincide with the anniversary, with the slogan “Let ‘Em Drop”, to use a bit of reverse psychology on domainers.
“The registry growing fairly fast,” said Calle. “What happens is that if those domains get dropped they’ll get picked up by real users and businesses.”
The rapid growth is no doubt due in no small part to Go Daddy, which has been prominently featuring .co domains on its front page for months, and to promotional pricing.
Under the current promotion, .CO Internet has roughly halved its registry fee to about $9.50 for first-year registrations, which has translated into $11.99 domains at the checkout.
But Calle said the higher price of .co domains, usually around the $30 mark, does not deter its target customer base, which are business users rather than speculators.
“Pricing is secondary to marketing when it comes to the growth rate — when we do things like the Super Bowl, or when Overstock [which rebranded as o.co] runs their commercials for a week nationally,” he said.

TechCrunch abandons Disrupt.co

TechCrunch seems to have abandoned the .co domain name it acquired with much fanfare last year to promote its Disrupt technology conference.
Disrupt, which kicks off its 2011 show in New York today, was one of the first organizations to obtain a .co domain under .CO Internet’s pre-launch Founders Program.
The conference used the domain to promote its Startup Battlefield competition in May 2010.
But today, just hours before the latest conference begins, disrupt.co still leads to this legacy content. It does not appear to have been updated for the 2011 show.
There was no mention in last year’s announcement of a multi-year commitment to use the domain, so perhaps it was a one-time thing.
The official Disrupt site can be found at disrupt.techcrunch.com.

One-letter domain sales not enough for .co

.CO Internet has added another high-profile customer to its roster of .co domain name registrants with the announcement today that Amazon has purchased four premium names.
Amazon has acquired a.co, k.co, z.co and cloud.co. The deal follows the allocation of t.co and x.co to Twitter and Go Daddy respectively and Overstock.com’s purchase of o.co.
While this is undoubtedly great news for .co’s visibility, it seems to me that .CO Internet is in danger of looking like a one-trick pony due to the brand’s over-reliance on high-profile short domain deals.
If Amazon throws its marketing muscle behind cloud.co, that will prove much more useful in terms of awareness-raising than the allocation of more single-character domains ever will.
It remains to be seen what Amazon plans to do with its three new short .co domains. It would be much more useful for the TLD if they are used for purposes other than URL shorteners.
There are only 36 such domains available. If people only associate .co with short Twitter links, the appeal of the TLD could be checked.
.CO Internet knows this, of course, which is why its marketing strategy from the start has been focused on gaining rank-and-file support from entrepreneurs and web developers.
Right now, I can’t help but feel that the longevity of the .co brand could benefit much more from a successful start-up or two than yet another single-character domain sale.
Prices for the Amazon domains were not disclosed. The four domains combined could feasibly have fetched a seven-figure sum, judging by the $350,000 Overstock paid for o.co.
The registry has also for some months been trying to sell off i.co, and has engaged Sedo as its broker.