.co domains - worthwhile?

[vizzo]

I've never ben too interested in .tv or .me.uk domains as I just don't think they hit the sweetspot on a number of levels.

However, I'm interested in the new .co domains that will be available this year. What do people think -
~will they be valuable?
~is it worth participating in a landrush to try to get something like say driving.co (I appreciate that the best keywords/brand names will be snapped up in the early phases)?
~is it worth waiting and seeing what's around when the dust has settled?
~are they going to be a viable alternative when all the .org .com .uk .asia etc are not available
~or are they going to be the next big thing, that will rank alongside or at least not far below .coms

Sorry if ther'e already a thread - I searched but didn't find one.

 

[Edwin]

They're junk. The fact that they're being explicitly marketed as "typos of .com" by several registrars says it all: if it wasn't for the fact that x% of people who are typing in something.com type something.co instead, they'd be as useless as any other random extension.

But just watch... whenever there's a landrush like this people always over-extend themselves (e.g. .me, .eu, .mobi, .asia etc. etc.) and 99% of people lose their shirts. You'd have to get VERY lucky (and go after something much better than driving.co) to pick up a .co name that gets a useful amount of typein traffic... and if you reg a name without typein traffic, you've just wasted the registration fee (traffic can always be redirected to try and get your money back, but without traffic you're dead in the water)

In the UK the two extensions with value are .co.uk and .com, probably in that order except for the strongest terms where the order is reversed. And nothing else.

In a different country, the extensions with value are .cctld of that country, and .com. And nothing else.

That's really it. Pretty much everything else is different degrees of fluff. Of course, a few people will get lucky as "fluff merchants" and make some money, but similarly a few people will win the lottery. Doesn't make it a smart "investment" as the vast, vast majority of their people lose their money...

In fact, if the average "landrush" booking is a random new ccTLD or TLD (and .co is a ccTLD, Colombia, no matter how it is marketed otherwise) is say 50 pounds, you might as well buy 50 pounds' worth of lottery tickets instead. You almost certainly won't win, but at least the rewards for winning are both clear and potentially very high.

 

[vizzo]

I wasn't just thinking in terms of resale value (I know this board is mainly about that) but in terms of keyword-rich domains that can be used. The guys at Google say that there is no preference in search results for .com or .co.uk over any other domain.
But basically you're saying that you think .co is never going to catch on as a major international extension.

 

[Edwin]

But basically you're saying that you think .co is never going to catch on as a major international extension.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Just like all the "domain landrushes" in the last few years, all the best names are going to be tied up by domain speculators. Most of them don't develop, or at best just mini-sites.

So in the real world, nobody's going to see many ads for sites on .co URLs, just like you don't see advertising for .asia, .mobi, .eu, .otherfailedextensionoftheweek...

Meanwhile, BILLIONS of pounds a year are being spent advertising the .co.uk and the .com extension. Every time you visit a website that has one of those extensions or see an ad in newspapers, magazines, on TV, hear an ad on the radio, see a poster on a bus shelter, etc. etc. that's subliminally emphasizing the supremacy of the ".co.uk" brand. And repeat that exposure thousands and thousands of times a year, and you'll quickly see why it is quite literally impossible for any upstart domain extension to gain any traction.