Morning Folks!!
While all the bloggers are tripping all over themselves this morning posting the new gTLD's, let's deal with REALITY. The lessons already learned.
We all know that NNN.COM are always in demand and prices can go to 6 figures or more. Most sell for between $25,000-$50,000. But what is the value of the .CO equilalent? I don't know, let's find out.
This is something I have not done before but I always deal with reality. So I want to sell the following NNN.co domains. I would prefer to sell the entire lot to one entity.
Let the bidding begin! (Maybe)
254.co |
264.co |
274.co |
284.co |
302.co |
340.co |
341.co |
342.co |
346.co |
347.co |
349.co |
354.co |
364.co |
374.co |
384.co |
394.co |
402.co |
403.co |
405.co |
407.co |
408.co |
410.co |
412.co |
417.co |
421.co |
429.co |
430.co |
436.co |
437.co |
439.co |
441.co |
446.co |
447.co |
449.co |
452.co |
453.co |
454.co |
460.co |
461.co |
462.co |
463.co |
467.co |
470.co |
472.co |
473.co |
474.co |
475.co |
476.co |
478.co |
481.co |
482.co |
483.co |
485.co |
487.co |
489.co |
490.co |
491.co |
492.co |
493.co |
494.co |
495.co |
496.co |
497.co |
498.co |
614.co |
624.co |
641.co |
643.co |
644.co |
704.co |
705.co |
706.co |
709.co |
714.co |
734.co |
736.co |
740.co |
741.co |
742.co |
743.co |
744.co |
746.co |
748.co |
749.co |
754.co |
764.co |
794.co |
796.co |
804.co |
964.co |
984.co |
Devon
Awesome post! This is certainly one way to prove reality.
*grabs popcorn*
KA
Today you won’t be able to pay someone to take them off your hands. Good luck!
legend
I don’t know about ‘most’ NNN.com sell for $25-50k
I’ve never sold one that high and regularly have seen sell for $1x,xxx range
is ok if great one and can afford to hold out
as far as NNN.co I’ll be honest I would not pay $7 for one, not even $1
just being honest
just stick with your amazing .com portfolio
Mitch
“I would prefer to sell the entire lot to one entity.”
Yeah, no cheery picking. :)
Mariux
nnn.COM most sell for between $25,000-$50,000 – YES.
nnn.co – 0 VALUE.
If Rick tries to sell in bulk, it has no value. That’s for sure.
Anunt
Lesson learned:
.com is worth much more than .whatever
.whatever domains have very little value…almost worthless.
Conclusion: New gTLDS are worthless!
RaTHeaD
love it.
Jeff Schneider
Hello Rick,
Good Day To You!
” When you connect ALL the dots, they ultimately ALL lead back to dot.COM”jas
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Francis Dedeyne
I offer 120$ for the lot.
Josh
You want people to put their money where their mouth is? Haha, don’t be silly!
I'll give you $100 for that domain!!!
This might be how this .co auction ends up :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zawUiL6kvWg
Scooby
Simple game of paper, rock scissors…
.COM beats .NET/.ORG which beats .CO which beats .TV which beats .BIZ which beats .INFO which beats .NAME/.PRO which beats all other country codes which beats every one of the new gtld’s.
Rick Schwartz
90 NNN.co’s
If they were .com would be worth a minimum of $2,250,000
As a .CO the value of those 90 domains is MINUS $2,250 at this point in time.
On the drop, a few thousand to acquire.
This is what we call”True Face Value”
Alan
Contact the .co King, Robert Cline and make him an offer.
legend
If you give me $2,250 I’ll take them off your hands Rick lol
H2O
That’s true. You are better off without them, Rick.
And your wise decision will aid those who are unsure about renewing/dropping them .COs.
I think .CO is toxic to the health. imho
Sem
There is nothing special about the numbers you have. 666.co sold for $7500 in January. That is the top sale. LLL.co have seen a ton more sales than NNN.co. I would be surprised if you could get $500 for the best one there. No domains with repeating numbers and lots of 4s. Hot market for numbers is the Chinese market but 4s go no where. If you owned something like 886.co or 868.co it might be a different story. You night have been able to get a nice ROI.
Collabo
.CO is not nearly as bad as the people on this wall make it out to be.
Keep in mind .COM could have very well been .CO if it didn’t have to be designated for a country code!
Kate
Nah seriously… I doubt he’s drinking his own KoolAid ;-)
He seems to be the largest LLL.co holder, no idea if he owns any NNN.
There is nothing wrong with .co, as long as people understand the difference between investment and speculation (or gambling).
Rick Schwartz
“I would be surprised if you could get $500 for the best one there.”
So far we are not even up to $500 for the entire lot.
Dean
Point well made… except for choice keywords that are sought after, the majority of the proposed extensions will fail to gain any investment value.
GTLDville.com
I would entertain 20×90 @ 1,800
cm
Looks like you picked these up a day after .co opened. Any particular reason you chose these…or were they just the only ones left? I picked up 15 NNN on opening day, so far 1 turned into $5k
Robbie
They are all due for renewal next month…
Rick are you going to keep these domains and renwew them or drop and reinvest the reg fee into a strong .com?
cm
Also, with more info out about the new possible gTLDs and who applied for them, do you wish you would have applied for one and if so which one?
ADAM
sorry but these domains do not look like quality ones.
I really do not know why registered them. at the beginning there was so many great opportunities to have a really great .co`s
Sem
Don’t expect it. You’ve put it out there with negative connotation. Who would want to buy it? Subjective selling. Who wants that? Selling to prove your own point…please.
It’s like trying to sell a pair of shoes to someone while telling them they are the worst shoes on the market.
Your post is a good joke at best.
Emma
The founder of the .CO is right when he said that he priced the .Co domains at $30 to deter domain speculators. In Fact .CO is supposed to be for the start-ups, the general population and end-users. If you are a domain speculator you will hate .CO domains, but if you are an end user then you should be happy because you can get a very good keyword domain with .CO extension at a price that may be 50 times less that the price of the .COM equivalent. One thing people don’t understand is that in the world any product has a price/value. If you buy .CO domain and you develop it you know that somehow you will leak traffic to its .COM equivalent, this is not the problem. The problem is how much traffic will you leak to its .COM equivalent?? This question should not be answered with feelings or fanaticism. You have to answer this question with reason, employing mathematics. We have to know the approximate percentage of type-in traffic first. Let’s just say that about 30% of all of traffic is type-in traffic, meaning that 70% of traffic comes through search engines(Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing etc). The next question will be: how do search engines treat different domain extensions for the purpose of ranking them?? Do they treat .com extension better than .CO or .NET? And if yes, to what degree? Let’s just say that search engines necessarily rank .COM higher than .NET equivalent and .NET will necessarily rank higher than .CO equivalent.If this is true, comparing conservatively in favor of.COM, it means that in a search result we would see a .COM website ranked all the way to the top and its .CO and .NET equivalents ranked bellow it. Then the other question will be: how do the general population treat different domain extension when deciding what website to go to when they see the search results? We are talking about the degree of conversion now. I know for sure that up to now .COM has more credibility than any other extension. But does this mean that .Net and .CO do not have credibility at all?? I think they do have some credibility. .CO for example, as Mike Mann said yesterday in one of his posts, makes even more sense than .COM, it is recognizable, but.CO has to work hard to live decently. He is right but he is right only in one sense, and I will explain this: Mike Mann is a domain speculator, and as a domain speculator, he can only make money with domain names that other domain speculators need to buy as an investment or domains names that end-users need to buy for their start-ups and these are the .COM domains that are in demand in this sense, that’s because .COM has the advantage of first goer and end-users mistakenly think that their online businesses can be successful only with a .COM extensions. But Mike Mann did not say anything about the degree of conversion of .CO by the general population in search engines. I am more than sure that if a .COM website is put near its .CO equivalent website in a search result the general population will go to both websites
(.com and .co), the volume of the traffic coming through the search engine will almost be the same. Certainly .COM website will receive more visits than its .CO equivalent website but the difference will not be so significant. We have to understand now that the degree of conversion of a domain extension in a search engine/result is one thing and the domain speculation is another thing. In the sense of domain speculation as well as in the sense of end users preference .COM is the favorite, but when it comes to conversion/recognition the difference between .COM, .CO, .NET is not so significant, meaning if you are an end-user, you can take advantage of the ignorance of the far majority of end-users/start-ups by buying good keyword .CO domains names cheaply, as they are now, and launching many website and you will do just fine as long as you employ a good SEO, because in reality the only advantage that .COM has when it comes to website traffic is the type-in traffic, which is no more than 10% of all traffic. So why buy a .COM domain name for $300K when you can a buy its .CO equivalent for $20K or even buy 15 to 20 good keyword .CO domains names with that amount and launch well-optimized websites and make money with the search engine traffic and accept losing the type-in traffic to their .COM equivalents websites?? Even if you leak 30% of the traffic to .COM you still will do fine taking into account the low cost of the .CO domains and the money you will be making. You may even do much better than .COM website if you take into account the quantity of the .CO websites you have. End-users should think like this. People’s ignorance is what allows the wise people to make money. Just think of your own experience when you go online and see a .NET website, don’t you click on them? There is a reason why .NET and .ORG domain names sell for comparably good price. I asked Rick Schwartz the other day to tell me the approximate percentage of type-in traffic as he always warns people about the traffic that would leak from .CO domains to their .COM equivalents if you develop a .CO domain so we can know and see if leaking traffic to .COM as a cost of doing business with .CO domain is bearable or not bearable . Rick never answered my question, and Rick will never answer that question because he is domain speculator, that is how he makes a living. He is not an end-user or an entrepreneur like Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Nick Swinmurn, Mark Zuckerberg, the founders of Amazon, Ebay, Zappos and Facebook respectively, just to name few. He is a speculator. It is in fact understandable that it would be suicidal for Rick to reveal all these things or educate people in the way I am doing here, because if people understand this reality his .COM domains names, which barely sell today, will have no destiny or they will lose value significantly. I already told people in my past posts that everything Rick says here he says it as a speculator, not as end-user and today people already realized that there is only one thing you can do with a domain name: developing it. There are tons and tons of premium .COM domains that are in the hands of speculators, they are not being used, not only because they are too expensive, but it is also because coming up with business concept/idea that has the likelihood to succeed even if you have a good domain name is not easy, it needs one to have a sharp brain, whereas you can become a domain speculator anytime, you just need money to buy then resell, and that is what many people are doing since the heard that there is money to be made in domain speculation, but only those who were around or who tried their luck without risking much when the domains names just came out are the ones who did well in the domain speculation business, they are no longer doing well today. That is the reason why the majority of domain names are still in the hands of speculators, they barely end up in the hands of end-users. If there is a domain sale totaling $50K it will be a big news in the domain industry, that says a lot about this business.
My advice: DEVELOP, DEVELOP, DEVELOP, DEVELOP DEVELOP your domain name. The chances of selling a domain name are very slim. SEDO and AFTERNIC sell only domain names totaling $1 million and half a month, and we have about 120 millions .COM domain names alone, and most of them are not being used, they are in the hands of full-time and part-time domain speculators, and there are many speculators/domainers. In domain conferences such as T.R.AF.F.I.C no sales are made. Rick Latona quit this business. He told domainers the truth, that there is no money in this business. Think twice before you waste you precious time and life.
rob sequin
Rick,
You know good domains when you see them and you like to speculate.
That is a good mix.
So, I’m sure you know these clearly fall into the”speculate” column.
Now, the question is, what are they worth, who wants them and how much will that person or people pay. So far your readers are not buyers.
Maybe end users? Hmmm, not sure there are m/any end users for these.
Honestly, I have never been a fan of number domains or .co so I wouldn’t take them if you pushed them to my account :-)
Sorry but that’s the truth from me.
Rick Schwartz
“You’ve put it out there with negative connotation.”
Shouldn’t matter. If I say I hate chocolate and sell chocolate, what difference does it make?
I am just proving several points. Or not.
But if they drop we know folks will bid on them.
If I renew, I am throwing good money after bad. Then since I am a long termer, I multiply everything by 10 years. So if I keep them, that is $22,500. Even if discounted still a big number. I am just turning a bill with no return into income as far as I view things.
I get more emails on my NNN.com’s than all other domains I have combined. THAT is why I grabbed these. 2 years ago I did not have the information I have today.
Keith
I am the one who sold 666.co. The only other NNN which has a shot at upper $xxxx or beyond is 800.co. The rest are rubbish IMO.
Rick, you gambled and will most likely lose this time. If you won every time it would take the fun out of it, right? Best wishes moving forward!
Rick Schwartz
Kieth
Absolutely! That’s why I am taking the loss now
Devon Sheffield
Emma,
Kudos for your long-winded post, but honestly the bottom line is that ANY .co domain will suffer leakage to it’s .com counterpart. If you own a store and 5 out of 10 of your customers slipped through the exit door, would that be acceptable to you? Would that be a savvy business plan? Let me put this in another perspective. If you owned”Larry’s Pizza Shop”, how would you feel if someone opened”Harry’s Pizza Shop” next door? I think many people underestimate the intrinsic value owning and protecting a brand, particularly after hard work and capital has been invested. That is why .com values will hold, if not increase in value. To most business owners, it’s simply not acceptable to allow your competitor to profit off of your brand. Which is why savvy business owners will eventually invest in the value a .com, even if their”brand” is based on a .co
“”He told domainers the truth, that there is no money in this business. Think twice before you waste you precious time and life.””
As for your perspective above on whether the industry is tapped out, I’m sorry but there are hundreds of domainers proving everyday, that this is simply not true. That’s like saying that since the economy and real estate business is terrible right now, there’s absolutely NO ONE profiting in the business anymore.
Jason Davis
This was a brilliant post. One of your best.
Emma
I said it clearly that there will always be a traffic leakage to .COM websites from .CO, but the question is how much traffic will leak? and is the quantity of the traffic that will leak so significant that you won’t be able to make a profit? We see physical stores having competitors next doors and all of them make money. If you leave you leave money to the other store. It is better this way than nothing.
steve
T.U.R.D. demands you remove this post immediately.
You are trying to undermind our lawsuits against you.
It will not be tolerated.
BullS
You have to pay me $1000USK to get rid of your pigeon dot whatever shit domains
NoSucker
Obvious ploy to dump his junk, hook up, fish on … not.
Leonard Britt
I might be willing to pay $1 for either 954.co or 305.co but despite the fact my wife is from Colombia I just don’t have any interest in .CO. And after spending a week in Cartagena, Colombia recently and seeing more .Travel than .CO, it appears Colombians don’t have any interest in .CO either.
Jacek
I think the traffic leakage from .co to .com which surely exists thesedays will keep going down as people’s awareness (ordinary internet users) of .co existence rises. But it wil take time for sure – a few years at best.
But it is already possible for .Co to beat .com -> good example”teenage game”
I’d rather have a good key word in .co for $9 than some ridiculously long .com crap as I can not afford single word .com’s
Bob
Keith:
Would you please comment on why you believe your 666.co sold for $5,000?
When did you make the sale?
Is 666 important in some cultures?
I am considering use of a 866 toll free number that has 666 in the last five digits, so the question is not strictly academic.
Rich understands this industry and has one of the best blogs in this industry. I appreciate your contributing to his post in a positive manner. Many do not.
CloudDomainer
What about nnn.xxx? Specifically 418.xxx which can mean”for 18″? I own some decent .COs like CloudComputing.co, CloudTechnology.co, NatGas.co, CleanEnergy.co (this one on godaddy auctions for $800), FuelCells.co, AllNatural.co etc etc. i’ve sold a lot of .COs in mid to upper $xxx.xx.
Richard
I would make a bid, but I spent all my moneys on .coms
Chadi Ghaith
I have a sound presentation relative to the .co value provided if u invest in brandable names one would use as a company name or extension.
Since .whatever is now going to shift the domain world focus into specialization (meaning the after the dot has now to carry more of a specific significance telling of the entity that lies before the dot), then I see the following:
.hotel tells best about hotels
.domain tells best about domains
.xxx tells best about sex
.blog tells best about blogs etc..
.co tells best about companies
Lets say u have a company of 4 letter initials like ZULA and u produce furniture, yet u want a domain that (when spotted) translate the fact that ur a company to the user.
Which domain will be best to choose (or perhaps which would be higher on ur list of priority):
1, ZULA.FURNITURE
2, ZULA.COMPANY
3, ZULA.CO
Now this doesn’t apply to generic domains i.e. camping furniture for instance. Of course in this case Camping.Furniture would be better maybe than CampingFurniture.co
I knw this may sound like am being smart or something, but really, I believe, if the trend is going towards specialization and being more specific, then domains like Games.net for internet games should be more desirable than Games.Games…
I really don’t like how the people cling on to a domain extension for good or for worse even if it doesn’t make sense.
Emma
you are right. All you hear from influential domain speculators is that a .CO website will leak traffic to its .COM equivalent website but they never told us how much traffic it will leak to .COM? There is always a cost when doing any kind of business and the traffic leakage to .COM may be the cost of doing business with a .CO website, that is why it is very important for end-users to know the approximate percentage of the traffic leakage to .COM so we can know if the cost is bearable or not bearable. Business is business, you can’t have everything in your way. People should start seeing things this way.
owen frager
Development is to license the string to a condo project call it .co for co-op and use these for apartment numbers and corresponding listings. They could also be bidder names for auction or recurring lots numbers or colorado department of public works codes to pay camera cam tickets
Rick Schwartz
If you lost 50% of all the calls coming to your cell phone would that be ok?
What if those 50% called your arch enemy by accident? Would that be okay?
Of course not!
Scott Neuman
Anunt, I always thought the new GTLDS were created by lawyers to start federal trademark suits.
Domain name value is in the eye of the beholder. Nice marketing on the .co here.
Emma
We all know it is not OK to lose even one customer/client to your enemy, but if you happen to be losing some traffic and you still making a decent living then you are in a good business. Your competitor may be making more profit than you but as long as the profit you make allows you to stay in the business and make a decent leaving then you are doing fine. I am not a wealthy person. I am just existing, not living. If I launch a .CO website and I happen to be losing 50% of all traffic coming to my website to its .COM equivalent and I still make a profit that allows me to stay in the business and live decently then I think I would say my business is doing fine. I can even maximize my profits by launching more .CO websites. Big physical stores have monopoly but this does not mean there are no small stores near these big stores making money and living decently. That is why I said that from domain speculation stand point .CO is not a good extension because it is not in significant demand by end-users because of the end-users’ ignorance. They have not yet realized that the only advantage .COM has is when it comes to type-in traffic. In the search engine .CO will do just as fine as .COM. Go to Google or Yahoo and do a search using the keyword”portofolio”, you will see a .CO website with that keyword ranking high, all the way to the top. I explained everything in my long post
Emma
if that is the cost of business and you can still make profit that can allow you to stay in business and live decently I will be happy with that.
Rick Schwartz
Sorry, NOBODY stays in business that gives 50% of their business away to their competitor without CHOOSING which business to give to their competitor. It has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with confusion and word of mouth and actively WORKING for the folks that want to put you out of business to begin with. Arguing here about this is folly.
Rick Schwartz
Btw, my definition of”Some traffic” would be 1% or 2%.
With 5% or 10% I would be very concerned.
With over 10%, I would be putting my efforts into fixing the problem.
35% is about the tipping point for any company to have a collapse.
50% they are dead, buried and forgotten.
61% The only reason Overstock survived was they have Overstocked.com. Had they abandon the .com in lieu of the .co, they would no longer be in business. So it was not their foundation. Compare that to somebody pinning their entire hopes on a 61% leakage. It’s over before it starts. It’s spitting in the wind. It does not work at this point in time and the right point in time is less than a 50/50 shot at the very best.
Emma
I can’t explain it better. Online business is in many aspects very different to the business that use physical stores. The volume of traffic to your website depends on how well you optimize your website(SEO) and how well you advertise it. Type-in traffic for a popular/product keyword website, which is about 10%, will mostly go to a .COM website and there is not much you can do about it, but there is nothing else that others can do but you can not do to put someone out of business. You can’t bribe search engines or force them to do things in your way.Search engine is the key to the success of .CO websites. Type-in traffic, which would leak to .COM websites should be seen as cost of doing business with a .CO web address
Rick Schwartz
“Type-in traffic, which would leak to .COM websites should be seen as cost of doing business with a .CO web address.”
Ok, and I am just saying that the cost of the leak is too high to sustain a business for the long term or the short term and ignoring that is a fatal business decision.
Emma
Just like typos. All websites that are popular or that make money have typo domains registered by other people and they get a significant volume of traffic. Are these popular websites out of business because some of their traffic go to the typos?? that is the cost of business I am want you to understand
Rick Schwartz
You can’t compare 1% or 2% to 52%. That’s the cost of business I want you to understand is not sustainable. Numbers don’t lie. Numbers don’t give a crap about an extension. People get confused and when most bought they were hoping they would get confused and the .com would have massive leaks. Well, it turned out the other way around. The .co is the leaker and the numbers are more significant than anyone could even believe. 61% on a mass level. This was not a small experiment.
Emma
What logic are you using to decide that the degree of the traffic leakage is to high to sustain a business for the long term or the short term and ignoring that is a fatal business decision??Can you say it in detailed way using math? We can even know what is the percentage of the traffic that is type-in traffic. Nobody has ever said it clearly
Emma
We don’t even know what is the percentage of the traffic that is type-in traffic. Nobody has ever said it clearly
Rick Schwartz
It’s called COMMON SENSE!
What .co websites do you run or do you work for .co?
Just curious? Lot of effort on a LOST battle.
Mike
Hi Rick, at this point no one is going to dare go against the crowd. You’ve already got 50+ commenters railing against your nnn.co. Even if someone had it in mind to give you an offer they are probably not going to have the stones to post it publicly in the comments now. Just pointing out some general psychology here that may be affecting your little experiment.
Anders
The domain king drops what he hyped and aquired 2 years ago. That´s the modus operandi of the worlds greatest domain investor? Guess you are mostly blabber and smoke.
Too bad the morphing internet landscape will prove most of us wrong. Too bad mostly for protectionist oldschoolers that is.
There will probably be some lucky bastard claiming to have had the vision ten years from now. Odds are it won´t be you.
Registrars will do fine though. And ICANN.
Rick Schwartz
Thanks Mike but I do have email and anyone serious will be emailing me not posting
Rick Schwartz
Besides, when you believe in what you do the last thing you worry about is the crowd
Rick Schwartz
Sorry Anders, NEVER hyped, just acquired. I took a risk. It did not pay off. End of story.
I just put my money out there, now I will either sell or let them drop. $4500 is my break even point.
Those are all facts and you seem to be the one blabbering like a loser. I am just strong enough to lay it all out on the table, cut my losses and move on.
Son od Spam
Life is a negative connotation. So tell everybody at least 5 million starts the bidding. THIS COUNTRY RUNS 110% ON P-E-R-C-E-P-T-I-O-N!!!! So Rick’s mistake is he did not FLUFF the group? I believe Sem is a salesman at best…BTW m-a-d.com sold @ dnjournal for $2375 on 6.14.2012 What a fucking joke!!!!
chaslowe
I just want to thank you for not using the words”The Big Reveal.”
John
Hey Rick.
I understand you have a lot of adult domains.
I own 872.xxx and 872 on your telephone dial = USA
This domain you should own
domains
emma,
your so clueless! seo this seo that. you still dont get it.
i just did a nice purchase today on a .com domain today. the value of it. the direct navigation. the generic value. the type in traffic.
be googles wanna developer. any update google does will impact your site. they cant mess with my direct navigation and what i do with my traffic. ppc. url forwarding. the list goes on and on. heck, put up a site if i wanted and i still have that direct navigation.
be the .co bitch. so many .com deals right now and private purchases.
fun times being a domainer! Bring it! In the meantime staying focused.
Keith
Bob, the domain sold for $7500 a few months after I foolishly rejected $10k. The number 666 is considered to be very lucky in china. In fact, it is proudly displayed on the front of many businesses there. I would not waste your money with NNN .co unless you get a deal on 800, 888, 777, 123 for example. A few months back I sold 432.co for about $400 and was happy to unload it.
The market isn’t showing much attraction for .co. We sometimes see low $xxxx sales reported but there are loads of top tier names collecting dust. Bottom line, take a shot on a few if your wallet permits but expect the worst.
Rick Schwartz
Emma, where did you run off to?
I just asked a simple question and you ran away!
“What .co websites do you run or do you work for .co?
Just curious? Lot of effort on a LOST battle.”
So how bout it Emma?
Jeff Schneider
Hello Rick,
We think you are low balling the leakage rate at 6o+. Seems low to us? When you consider TOTAL CLICKS to .COM CHANNELS Domestically at 90%+ along with INTERNATIONAL redirects crowding the CHANNEL you begin to see things in a different light. By the way just doubled my websites value, it was ridiculously cheap ! Market values are rapidly readjusting as we speak.
Gratefully Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Bob
Thanks Keith – the info on 666 and .co was very helpful.
The question I ponder is if you own valuable .coms are there ever any circumstances where you should buy the same names in the co. With the great info and insight Rick has shared regarding .co would it not be better to let someone else own the .co, let them develop and promote the .co site, and you reap the reward of the leakage?
At this stage of the game, are you not just wasting money to buy any .co? Even if you use the .co to redirect to the .com are you not just wasting money.
I welcome comments from anyone on this issue.
Thanks again.
Emma
the leakage from a .CO website to .COM website will happen only with type-in traffic (direct navigation) which is no more than 15% at beginning and with time the leakage will be lower and lower to a fixed rate, because with time fewer and fewer people will make the mistake of going to .COM. The numbers don’t lie. Go to go to cubestat.com and find out the percentage of taffic that the website portafolio.co is losing to portafolio.com or enter.co is losing to enter.com, you will see that the leakage is no more than 5%, and the leakage has to be seen as the cost of making business. Don’t people pay rents for the warehouses or stores they rent?? that is the cost of making business.
Emma
I did not run off Rick. I Dont run any .CO website or work for .CO. I just speak the truth as it is. I undertand that as a domain speculator you have to say things that would favor your business. I would do the same maybe, that is the very reason you asked me the question, because you alot at stake.
Jp
@Emma
Um, I would say leakage is Pretty significant from noncom to com. So you run an ad on tv that says go to something.co and overstock already told us how many people go to something.com instead by accident (can’t believe Rick hasn’t quoted that one at least 10 times here, you feeling ok man?)
Then you name a whole stadium the something.co stadium and how many people go to something.com? Again overstock already answered that one.
Yes Emma I agree with you seo traffic wont leak to .com. Well that is assuming google ranks all tlds as equals (we’ll just go with that).
Emma
The problem with Overstock is that it was already known by overstock.com for many many years. It had more than 8 million unique visitors and suddenly it re-branded to .CO. What do you expect, specially when its base of customers knows that typing .com or .CO will take them to the same destination, the same website with the same design, with the same everything? I don’t understand why nobody has ever given the approximate percentage of of .CO leakage to .COM, all you are saying is the leakage is significant. You have to state the approximate quantity so that people know how to deal with that leakage. But I investigated this by going to http://www.cubestat.com and see how much traffic http://WWW.portafolio.co is losing to http://www.portafolio.com and http://www.enter.co is losing to http://www.enter.com, and I found out that the leakage is no more than 5%, and these .CO websites are highly ranked in search engines. Start being realistic. .CO are very cheap, why not use .CO whose .COM equivalent is already developed and making millions of Dollars. First of all you will have automatic/natural traffic, that is, the traffic that the .COM website will be leaking to your .CO website. It won’t be much but it will be something, which you can use to show some of customers of the .com website that you have the same product(s) they maybe interested in but the price, the quality, the concept,the method of delivery or customer service may be different. People like to try things and have good deals. This people may spread the word by mouth and you will begin to have more and more visitors. Search engine is the main tool that can help you get more traffic and they don’t go by domain extensions, and as a prove, I showed you the websites that is highly ranked in search engines. Secondly you will always be the winner because if you take into account the low price of .CO domain and the customers you will be stealing from .COM website in type-in as well in search engine traffic, you will see that you are the winner. Just think like this: how many people are looking for business opportunities and they are not finding it??? millions and millions of people. Some of them fell in the traps of scammers who promise them higher return investment and it will not happen, and you buy a .CO domain, perfumes.CO for example, for $10000 for example, and you start getting 2000 unique visitors a month as type-in traffic that will leak from .COM as well as search engine traffic, won’t you be happy with that result?? I would be happy with that because it is far better to have something like that than having no business, and I can use the same concept to develop more of .CO domains. If you invested a lot in .COM domains I understand that, that you have a lot at stake, so you have to be talking in a way to discourage people from doing anything with .CO domains.
EM @ YA.NET
This is a nice video:)
Altaf
@Anunt,
It is difficult to predict you though you got some awesome intellect.
Jp
@Emma
You know overstock tried to rebrand to O.co not Overstock.co right? So they went out and told everyone to go to O.co and more than half went to O.com instead. Nothing to do with tying in or remembering Overstock.anything. Simple as that they said go to O.co and more than half went to O.com. I’m sure some people still may have also just gone to Overstock.com or even Overstock.co but this statistic was reported by Overstock as the percentage of the specific population of people from the sample population of people they specifically instructed (by tv commercials and a stadium name) to go to O.co and instead went to O.com. Thems the facts. Can’t say it would be the same in every case but this was a pretty good one. A) the domain was simple, just one letter left of the dot, and B) They named a stadium after it for goodness sakes. If that’s not strong branding and marketing then what is? Not to mention the massive amount of press and tv advertising efforts.
Emma
First of all Overstock never revealed the approximate or exact quantity of the traffic leakage. I don’t know who told you more than half of their customers were going to O.COM. And when you say more than half of their customers were going to O.COM, are you talking about type-in traffic or you are saying that 100% of overstock traffic was type-in traffic and more than half went to o.com?? what about the traffic coming through search engines?? was this type of traffic also going to O.com???
George
People not sure why you say that its these are good for the end user. I disagree completly!
The .co are great for one thing and one thing only!
for seo period.
Seo people wont because if you see it in google you will click it! You wont care its a co
this is why ricks list its almost worthless.
but on the other hand if they would be a keywords rich, but I mean good keywords
you would stand a change, let me illustrate:
insurance – you could not rank that in a million years
car insurance – still a bit to hard
car insurance quotes – still a good keyword but we a half decent change to rank and get good traffic
just my two cents on the .co’s
George
but then again maybe I cant be objective here… since I own a few domains in the manner described in my other comment! :)
here is my email if someone is interested :D freecache at gmail
Jp
@Emma, you are right, not sure where I got that more than half number. The actual quote is:
“Mr. Johnson said customers responded well to the O.co advertising, but after watching the spots,”a good portion” of those who sought out the website went to O.com, instead of O.co.”
I think the original article was at AdAge.
So who knows what”a good portion is”. All we know is that it was enough to change Overstock’s course.
Adem
I am no expert in this field, I do however go with my gut feeling.
I held on from any .co investments early on, but with time it is becoming apparent that the .co’s will be just as valuable as the .com’s if not more.
Like everything in life there is a balance, .co just makes more sense, is universal and easy to remember.
I think you should be more patient and wait for the wave to turn.
I have a good feeling about the .co’s , when there is no .com available .co is the next best thing, plus in the last 6 months I have seen a huge surge of unavailable domain names.
I just found about you and have been reading your blog, thanks for putting the time into this and trying to inspire others.
Gemini
domain guy
anunt…you changed your opinion about .com? .whatever is worthless after all your preaching? why? also I am surprised to see you back on ricks board. I thought you were banned?
did you do anything with flowers.mobI?
domain guy
a negative value to .co domains? with 2k more tlds coming out? why buy what will change their value into plus terrotory?
Altaf
Could you refer your previous posts where you said ‘domains or .com will have no value after sometime’. What a talent!
H2O
Jajaja! Emma, you should by some .al and .ly’s too! They even better for SEO. lol. My grandma told me that Google treats them as gTLDs. Whatever that means! Stupid. Clearly some people don’t know anything about SEO and think a .CO will save the day. Dream on.
Too funny when you see a die hard .CO lunatic yapping on and on and not making sense at all. I bet you have too many .COs. Care to share them over here? You gonna pay all those renewals? You are a dummy.
And to all those dummies who are are getting defensive and trying to defend the .COco puffs they got, just know that Juan doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you.
You’ll probably just renew your stupid .COs because you are too embarrassed-that’s right: embarrassed to admit to yourself that you were a fool to have bought this crap in the first place and by renewing, you are will be saving yourself the embarrassment. Or is because if you drop the .COs you won’t have any other domains in your portfolio because, they make up 100% of your portfolio? ;) I have seen this on the forums.
I’m pretty sure Rick doesn’t care as much as the rest of you idiots defending .CO because he has literally thousands of high value .COMs-which none of you .CO fanboys/girls have. He can take this loss with no problem at all. It was a risk. Not like any of the .CO fanatics been making money with it anyway. Difference?? Rick is moving on, and the rest of you are are still going to waste more money on renewals.
One month later since this article’s been published and so many people are now frantically trying to sell their .CO domains, and none are getting bids. True. I guess that is their cue to renew. lol Once again to save themselves the embarrassment on the domain forums. Jajaja! Emma, you one of them babe? Goodluck. ;)
Cheers