It’s no secret that my money is on .com domains. It’s the only generic top-level domain that has consistently been dominating the sales charts and even with the many new TLDs that launched during the last couple of years, I do not see this changing anytime soon. There is, however, one other extension in which I have been successfully making a moderate profit (low five-figures) during the last years and that is .Co
Before .io came around, .Co easily was the most popular alternative for .com for startups and the extension has seen huge end-user adoption since it became publicly available in 2010 thanks to a very well executed and aggressive marketing push by the registry at the time. As a result, many premium, one-word .Co domains were snapped up for big bucks during the landrush auction in 2010 and despite competition from some new, cool kids on the block such as .io and .ai, .Co continues to report impressive sales in the aftermarket.
The most important driver for its success is the large number of startups that embraced the extension over the years and build large and successful businesses on the domains with some of them forking out a significant amount of money to acquire their .Co domain. Here are 10 of them. (more…)