.Co Registry Responds To Overstock.com Announcement, Overstock.com Gives More Details & Releases The O.Co iPad App
The .Co registry just posted it response/thoughts on the Announcement made by Overstock.com yesterday through Adage.com, on its pull back of its re-branding from O.Co.
The blog post entitled “A Blip On the Radar” was authored by Juan Calle the CEO of the registry, is posted on the registries blog.
Part of the post contains statements made by an unidentified representative of Overstock.com who shared some additional thoughts on the announcement and the future of O.co
Also today separately the company, issued a press release announcing the availability of the O.co App for the iPad.
“”Overstock.com President Jonathan Johnson. “Our new O.co iPad App lets customers find great deals on lots of products from the convenience of their iPad. One great feature of the app is that it allows customers to easily share great deals they find with their friends through Facebook and Twitter.”
Here is the full post from the .Co Registry unedited:
Some in the domain industry (read: domainers) are up in arms about the recent announcement by Overstock.com that it would slow down its rebranding to O.co. Given the amount of speculation and commenting going on about this within that community, I felt it was appropriate to reach out to Overstock.com and get a clear picture of what is going. Here you go:
—————–
Why did Overstock.com first begin using O.co?
When Overstock.com started twelve years ago we only sold surplus inventory. However, as our business model has evolved, Overstock.com is no longer just an online liquidator. Because “overstock” implies surplus or liquidation inventory, it no longer accurately reflected who we are today as a company.Our offerings now span from cars to insurance, and include first-run brand name apparel, electronics and home décor. We wanted an identity that more accurately reflects how the company has evolved; hence we embraced O.co to reflect the direction in which we are heading.
Why are you shifting your brand emphasis back to Overstock.com? When does this shift become effective on the website and social media channels?
We have been listening to our customers and have learned that they we’ve moved too quickly in the transition. They are telling us that we’ve done it too fast. So we are going to down shift one gear by re-emphasizing Overstock.com and noting that O.co continues to be a shortcut to our site. Internationally, we will keep using O.co exclusively. O.co will still be promoted through our mobile website and our iPad application. The shift in emphasis began showing up on the website and our social media channels in early November.What had the initial reaction been like from your customers?
Re-branding takes time and we certainly didn’t expect the new name to be adopted overnight. We were pleased with the early customer acceptance of O.co as a shortcut for Overstock.com and thus moved the rebranding efforts to the next gear. Many customers reacted positively, and others expressed that the transition was happening too quickly. What we learned was that we haven’t yet adequately transferred the decade of brand equity we have in Overstock.com. So, we’re down-shifting the re-branding effort in order to leverage and transfer that brand equity.The .CO domain is fairly new and Overstock was taking a big risk as the only company to use the domain as part of its brand. Thoughts?
It is true that Overstock.com was the first online company to use the .CO as part of its brand. This put Overstock.com at the forefront of digital marketing. The decision to use a .CO domain in such a big way underscored our willingness to lead the market and to disrupt the status quo.So when will you become O.co? Is that still on the cards?
We expect that O.co will continue to emerge as our brand over time. It will be a gradual transition, and may take a few years. We didn’t want to risk throwing out the brand equity we’ve built with Overstock.com. Ideally, in time you’ll just see Overstock.com fade away and O.co take its place.What about O.CO Coliseum, will that be re-named as well? Wasn’t it Overstock.com Coliseum to begin with?
We won’t be changing the name. The name will remain “O.co Coliseum”.—————–
There you have it folks. A blip on the radar. As I’ve mentioned in the past, .CO is part of a marathon, not a sprint.
But if you’re a .CO fan and interested in something actually worthy of news, Om Malik, founder of GigaOm just rebranded to .CO. In case you don’t know who Om Malik is, well, he has 1.2 million Twitter followers. To top that off, Kloud.CO was featured on CNN, Quarterly.CO is blowing up in social media, and Founder Institute, the worlds largest pre-seed incubator is now living at FI.CO. Not too shabby!
If you’re interested in seeing more of the latest entrepreneurs and companies building on a .CO domain, check out Opportunity.CO.
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Sounds to me like if O.com was presently available, they would have switched from O.co to O.com before having to fall back on Overstock.com.
Either way, it’s clear they prefer .com over .co since they didn’t switch to Overstock.co which they also own.
@Michael –
“Not … I do think they have the option to switch the stadium deal back to Overstock.com”
- Overstock is going down with or without the o.co gimmick.
- Your Mom & Pop reference – rather than the mom & pop using http://www.ebay.com/ozone1/ozone2/ozone3/momandpop/index.asp they can use as their “BILLBOARD” url – momandpop.co/index.asp (or over 1 TRILLION other non.coms) – but then momandpop.com gets all the traffic.
@George Kirikos – dead on – Warran Buffet =”You only know who is swimming naked when the tide goes out” – being sold a bill of goods is painfull – we have all done it – yes – trying get whole by dragging a new generation of suckers would keep me up at nite.
“Overstock is like the angry bride filing for divorce, and writing in the court papers “He was such a bad husband, even the ring wasn’t real! The marriage was doomed at the start!” – the public and the snake oil guy can only bullshit you so many times – very nice – I like the Mail order bride analogy as well – Damm.
@Why – Yes – Tough being realists in this non.com pool of denial.
it might be interesting to know how much additional nxdomain traffic, if any, verisign has received for o.com since the o.co marketing began.
how many users tried to navigate to o.com instead of o.co?
The love afffair between Overstock and .co did last longer than Kim Kardashian’s marriage to Kris Humphries.
That’s something for Robert Cline to crow about!
@Why –
14,000 a month a year ago
137,000 a month today
per compete.com
This is what’s so beautiful about capitalism, markets, and America!
Some people think they should be selling, and some think they should be buying! I want to see people panic and sell their .CO premium names at Reg. prices. I guarantee ya, Rick himself will be the second to scoop them up, after me at number one.
What makes .CO valuable is not O.CO, it helped to give it gravitas, but that’s not what makes it attractive; .CO is acronym for company in most civilize countries. That’s it’s biggest strength. Sooner or later, say 5 to 7 years, .CO will be second place, and a very aggressive second at that, commanding prices close to half of .COMs.
Secondly, .CO is well ran; I wouldn’t bet against the management team at .CO.
The news today is superficial for a long term investor.
@George Kirikos-
“The love afffair between Overstock and .co did last longer than Kim Kardashian’s marriage to Kris Humphries.”
I have to get off this thread – do something else for a while – your are cracking me up – cant stop laughing – something very different about that Kris “husband” guy – as I told my wife – I would not feel comfortable about being at the strip joint with him – draw your own conclusions
is this data available to all registrars?
how does compete get those numbers?
maybe they are just estimates?
anyway, if the numbers are even close to accurate, that says something about .com, doesn’t it?
@Rich
You may make fun of Crazy Mr.Cline,but he has more balls then most of you put together,he has 730 LLL.CO’S where you have nothing.
Rich, I hope he is selling at least $17,000 worth of them a year to renew his portfolio.
Alan@
I’m sure he is,as i did renew my $40,000 .co portfolio
According to Compete.com
o.Com has gone from 14K visitors a month to 137,000 visitors a month in September
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/o.com/
Judging from my own site like thedomains.com Compete.com numbers are under actual traffic.
@MHB
o.com?
Right the non-resolving page of o.com is still tracked by Alexa and compete as all non-resolving pages are.
Overstock.com on the other hand get non-seasonally 14M visitors a month so 100K visitors isn’t a huge percentage
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/overstock.com/
Mike,
but
o.co going from 1,500 to 265
overstock.co from 200 to 300
o.com going from 14,000 to 137,000
just dont see that happening
if only 256 out of 137,256 people got it correct,
we need to be selling glasses or memory enhancement products
@Rich
You may make fun of Crazy Mr.Cline,but he has more balls then most of you put together,he has 730 LLL.CO’S where you have nothing.
///////////////
A sign of folly, not balls.
Rick himself will be the second to scoop them up, after me at number one.
////////////
Given he has dropped most of his I doubt it.
shake my boobie, shake, shake
come on folks.
have a life.
life’s too short for all this.
.Co is in an optimum trajectory.
it is just normal day to day business adjustments, that actually will
benefit .Co and O.Co and Overstock Company by next year.
Have fun
Celebrate
Cheers!
All of this stuff is just the pathetic abuse of clueless Board of Director’s squandering sharehold money so they can take their vacuum silver tongued resumes to the next public company or group of desparate wananbe VC investors.
@MHB
100k direct navigation a month is not bad.
@Robert
shake my boobie, shake, shake
It’s shake my “booty” not ” boobie”. Boobie is slang for a “stupid or foolish person”, or as
a verb, “to make a stupid or foolish mistake”. Robert………..the Freudian dogs are barking!
I am so happy we have a
resident linguist to
help me with all my
language faux pas
Cheers brother.
When are Overstocks next financials due? How have they been faring the last couple of years? How is the competition doing compared to them the last couple of years?
Sometimes retail blames the snow for their poor show, could this be the case here?
Just a question by the way, the first I ever heard of overstock is the .Co deal, its truely a non entity on the world stage.
In the US when you type in O in the Google tool bar does it predict .Co? Even when I type in O. (dot) its still doesnt complete it for me and to put that into perspective O.J. Simpson is an option!
Would love any feedback.
“Judging from my own site like thedomains.com Compete.com numbers are under actual traffic.”
On some sites these numbers are one third, on others its like 1/10.
Who the hell shops at Overstock ?
I know people do, but I can’t figure out who they are.
I have never seen anyone use it…… and never heard anyone say, “Check to see if Overstock.com has it”.
@back in the real world
When are Overstock’s financials due?
Do you mean the first attempt or the usual second attempt that comes as a restatement 2-3 years later?
Overstock financial
Nov 2nd
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ostk
also here
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/h?s=OSTK&t=2011-11-01T17:07:01-04:00&id=51645089
Not pretty
earnings call
http://seekingalpha.com/article/303412-overstock-com-s-ceo-discusses-q3-2011-results-earnings-call-transcript?source=yahoo
“Who the hell shops at Overstock ?”
That’s a more interesting question.
I don’t know about other people, but I “shop” at price comparison sites like pricewatch or Google shopping. Whomever I buy from is whomever had the best price and shipping terms.
What I have also found out is that if you have an online price and go to Sears, they will sometimes match it.
Attempting to build an online retail brand is a tough row to hoe. IMHO, online shoppers have more loyalty to their wallets than to any retailer.
It boggles my mind that a marketing team of educated people would consider the re-branding of their company to O. Can you imagine what kind of confusion that would cause! There are a ton of businesses that think they represent the ultimate “O” business in the marketplace. Besides, what kind of negative PR would the company get from the adult word if it makes one slip up – O boy, o my, o ####.
“.mobi as we always discuss, was a technology based extension which became unnecessary when technology caught up and passed it in the from of an iphone.”
.mobi was not technology based extension. It may have been marketed as such but in fact it was nothing more than a solution to a problem that did not exist. It did not BECOME unnecessary, it was never necessary. The difference between .com and .mobi or .com and .anything is NOTHING. They are the same. They function the same. They are about as different as toll free 800 and 888 numbers. 800 and 888 work the same. The only diffenece is mind and marketshare, nothing more nothing less. .mobi was not a tech based extension, it was simply an extension, albeit about as popular as an 855 toll free line
Dunno
The purpose of .mobi was to use it to re-format sites to look proper on a mobile device
mobi .mobi
Introduced 2005
TLD type Sponsored top-level domain
Status Approved
Registry Afilias
Sponsor Nokia / Vodafone / Microsoft / Afilias
Intended use Sites intended for mobile device use
Actual use Began to be available for use in 2006
Registration restrictions Adherence to mobile-compatibility style guidelines can be enforced by challenge process
Structure Direct second-level registrations are allowed; selected generic second level domains, such as weather and music, are reserved for distribution in an equitable manner which may include auction
Documents ICANN New sTLD RFP Application; ICANN sponsorship agreement
Dispute policies UDRP
Website MTLD
The domain name mobi is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from the adjective mobile, indicating its use by mobile devices for accessing Internet resources via the Mobile Web.
The domain was approved by ICANN on 11 July 2005, and is managed by the mTLD global registry. It was originally financially backed and sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia Mobile, Orascom Telecom, GSM Association , Hutchison Whampoa, Syniverse Technologies, and Visa, with an executive from each company serving on mTLD’s board of directors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mobi
Now you can argue whether it was ever need or ever worked but there is no doubt that tech was the basis behind the whole idea.
@ David J Castello said: “@Louise
”
My Mother’s in Florida, I’m not married and I don’t have a daughter.
And when I finally have a son I hope he’s as fortunate as I’ve been
Maybe I’ll see you on Millionaire Matchmaker one of these days! Bring some good pr to domaining . . .
The issue is: Google is indexing comments, now: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/11/get-post-and-safely-surfacing-more-of.html
so all those nasty Android/Apple one-upmanship and namecalling will become regular Google fare. Big business is out for your comments – watch out!
The big companies are looking to exploit and milk every last bit of unstructured data out there, including comments. It’s all about unstructured data.
It’s like the words of Skating Away:
do you ever get the feeling that the story’s
too damn real and in the present tense?
Or that everybody’s on the stage, and it seems like
you’re the only person sitting in the audience?
We’re all going to be on the stage in no time, like it or not.
Dunno +1
The same could be said for many things re: domains.
Create a problem then propose a solution. Amazing.
Alas, many people are easily fooled. They believe whatever they are told. If I recall, some banks fell for it and they paid for .mobi domains.
That said, here’s an historical factoid to ponder.
When the dishwasher was first introduced, it did not sell as expected. Women were happy to wash the dishes by hand.
It was only after the dishwasher was marketed as a “luxury item” that housewives began to take interest.
Now if you asked people today if they are happy to wash dishes by hand versus using the dishwasher, what would the response be?
You want to show a separate version of your site trimmed down for mobile screens? Use a subdomain. It costs nothing.
m.yoursite.com
Or parse User-Agent for iPhone, Nokia or whatever.
Better yet, let’s make the whole web mobile-friendly and watch page loading speeds on your desktops and laptops increase 10-fold. Not to mention it would eliminate myriad javascript security issues.
@Louise
I’ve actually known a couple of girls on that show and, let’s just say, they were NOT who they were repped to be
They’re not all college graduate real estate workers, pharmaceutical reps, or personal trainers?
First, Overstock made a monumental blunder by trying to scrap a brand which has been around since the early days of ecommerce and trying to turn themselves into a single letter. A single letter is not a brand. It’s like when Prince changed his name to that crazy symbol.
The second major mistake was selecting an extension nobody knows about it.
Here 1+1= 0
@David Costello
Champagne?? Why not whisky.com?
Three women…all those primo domains…three women…3…I have a new idol!
@James –
“Its Castello – not Costello – Punk ::))”
I figured I would save David having to send out his boiler plate email above
@BrianWick LOL
@James Most women prefer champagne over whisky
@Castello
But everybody prefers Whisky.com!
Sorry, Castello – I knew it was Castello…typo.
Hi,
@ UDRPtalk – Exactly
Its been months, and hundreds if not thousands of TV spots…still trying to ‘explain’ that their new website address is o .co….
I saw two of the ‘tv spots’ (commercials) yesterday…still trying to explain o .co
Enough said, as your post says it all
Peace!
Dan
Hi,
Interesting Blog Post:
Overstock learns that .com is still king
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8282-overstock-learns-that-com-is-still-king
‘D’
Any idea why godaddy.co is not resolving properly? godaddy.me along with go.me do well.
@ .Me Of Course
“MHB”, Broke the bank for a .me sale that is why their happy to be up and running
‘Overstock’ Is desperately trying to get out of “O.co” & is blaming ‘Godaddy’ for some unknown reason ~ that is why their down.
Just a little fun
Peace!
‘D’
If you want a little bit of fun, have a look @ http://godaddy.gd/