Neustar, managers of .CO, announced the reaching of an important milestone for the ccTLD adopted by numerous brands, corporations and end users worldwide.
Two million .CO domains are now under management, and while attending NamesCon, we had the pleasure of talking to Lori Anne Wardi, Vice President at NeuStar, Inc. on this exciting milestone.
Lori Anne Wardi mentioned that the type and rate of growth presented by these registration numbers, is the direct result of a strategic focus on technology, innovation, start-up and angel investor markets.
During its initial launch, dot .CO aimed at achieving a global market share among other TLDs; the eventual change in focus helped eliminate the amount of fatigue often associated with targeting a wide number of markets, and increased the adoption numbers in a spectacular fashion.
Lori Anne Wardi – VP/Neustar.
At the time of the .CO acquisition by Neustar, less than 1.5 million .CO domains were registered.
In less than two years, the 30% growth isn’t only important as a number, but also as an effective shift in the strategic focus and the subsequent phenomenal adoption of .CO by a broad range of professionals, building businesses on a brand that offers clarity, brevity and sustainability.
Some key points about the current .CO numbers and growth:
- In 2010, .CO had 28,000 domain name registrations. Surpassing 2 million registrations represents a greater than 7,000% increase in growth since the global launch of the namespace.
- The .CO renewal rate continues to show high usage of domains in a similar fashion to the industry standard, at around 50% for first year renewals and increasing to 80% for domains registered for more than five years (i.e. domains that have been renewed more than five times since 2010).
- .CO is a global namespace, with 50% of registrations coming from the US, 11% from the UK, 5% from Colombia, 4% from Canada and 3% from India.
I am excited to see the future of .CO s finally taking off and helping others get more interested in investing in more .CO s in the future.
The best thing .CO could do is reduce their regular registration fee and renewal fee.
Compared to .COM, .NET, .ORG and lots of others, .CO has one of the highest renewal rates of a ‘global’ extension. It should be in the $10 to $15 range to be more competitive.