.Co has just opened registration for the general public. While writing this blog & sometimes looking at domaining blogs now I realize I one strange thing.
As with IDNs I believe an extension or a domain type can be popular with usage. I do not think that 100,000 new domains going straight to parking makes a domain extension successful. I’ve read that the company went all out to promote this extension. I think otherwise.
In my previous post I wrote wouldn’t it be wonderful if a domain extension was created & was marketed to people to use them? Like .canon being tied to an online service.
Wouldn’t it make sense if the .Co team actually wanted the domains to be used they would market it to people who really develop sites, or do web marketing. If you turn off the domaining part of your brain & look at marketing blogs, agency blogs I don’t see a single blurb or dollar spent on advertising. I do see they mainly covered every site domainers go to. This gives the impression that they massively promoted the extension.
Only going to domainers looks like it will make .Co another dot Mobi to be. Time will tell but I don’t see this as any major extension “yet”. There are services that I really love, some I dislike but I don’t want to influence anyone to invest in anything I believe they will eventually loose money on.
I would have been convinced if they even had ads on SitePoint.com, SERoundtable.com, or even digitalpoint.
Even with IDNs I personally don’t think my time online is as valuable as the time I spend going out with people working in Ad Agencies to talk about domain marketing.