Will the New .co Domain Make a Difference?

Alec Williams, Marketing Specialist AT Fifth Gear, writes:

If you have missed out on that special domain name, you might want to start looking again. There was some big news this past week in the world of the Internet, most importantly the introduction of the new .CO business domain names. You can now purchase .CO domain names for your business, organization, or personal website.

For instance, the ever so popular Overstock company purchased “O.co” for a measly $350,000. You may say that is a lot of money but for Overstock the purchase for O.co was a wise branding decision. This is just a minor expenditure for their re-branding efforts from Overstock to simply “O.”

The .CO craze was developed for those business specific organizations to purchase their domain and not be cluttered by all the other domain names out there. As for our organization, a company (other than our own) also called Fifth Gear had already taken the domain www.fifthgear.com. So in order to find a domain that coincided with our brand we had to purchase www.infifthgear.com. This was of course slightly different than our brand. This was not a major concern to us because we had the resources and marketing capabilities to associate Fifth Gear (order fulfillment provider) with www.infifthgear.com.

The true question is whether this .CO era will make a difference in online business. We believe that it will free up space for more companies to participate in the online business industry and provide more choices for the consumer. It will also help grow existing businesses to provide a segmented market of .com users and .co users.

For online retailers this is a big step also. This will increase their exposure to the Internet and will hopefully boost sales. Providing another avenue for Internet domains and businesses, .CO will be a new and exciting step towards an ever changing technology.

(See also a companion posting on the domain name marketplace.)