XQ Domains: XQ.biz

Those who already know about .co may skip the first paragraph. Just making things easier for you!

.co is the Internet Country Top Level Domain for Colombia (ccTLD). Most good .com domains are already taken making it difficult for many business owners to build their site on a  .com domain. .CO, even being the country level domain for Columbia is being promoted as .COmpany, .COrporation…the promotion aims at helping trademark holders secure their names and business owners to acquire a reasonable alternative to .com. Besides, .CO is 33.33% faster to type than .com!

Following the extension’s opening to public registration a few days ago, many domainers went about registering as many .co domains they could (the registration cost of .co averages about $28). By the end of the first day, almost all possible reasonably good sounding domains were gone. Many webmasters I have come across spent more than $1000 registering .co domains. Some spent 5 figure amount!!

Now, I like to see .co domains as future investment. Future investment because you’re unlikely to find a buyer for your just-registered .co domains at a high price in a month from now…unless of course if you own a killer domain like Colombia.co or E.co (sold at Sedo for $81000) etc. In this .co domain buying spree, I remain skeptical: What happened to .im(promoted as Instant Messaging), .ws(promoted as World Site) and .me(promoted as “Its about YOU!”) was sad! Resellers who bought domains on those extensions in the past are trying hard to get rid of them at low $xx today. Others letting them expire!!

When a new extension is released, many investors jump into buying domains without thinking much about whether the investment will actually pay off! Sure…there is no surefire way to know how an extension will do. But when I see similar situation go downhill in the past, why not evaluate the aftermarket first? In other words, I believe it’d be unwise to bust my $xxx on an unknown future.

With $1000, I’d buy a couple good .coms than 30 .cos to be absolutely honest. However, for the helluvit, I did register just one .co domain…468.co!!

I wish .co better luck than .ws and .me and XQ Domains will join the aftermarket action if things look promising!(…) However, I am positive that if the extension is not extensively marketed and USED by developers and companies alike in the coming 6 years, the current  hype is likely to be sad news for .co investors.