According to blog post on the .Co blog this morning the registrar is reporting that domains under management grew 24% from 2011-2012
“The .Co blended renewal rate is 63% and growing”.
“First time renewal rates are in the mid 50% range, and second time renewal rates or older are in the low to mid 70% range.”
You can read a more in-depth look at the .Co 2012 results on registration and renewals in an interview we conducted with the COO of the registry back in October.
Here’s a question for you: The Chinese buy a ton of .com’s… and they will be increasing they domain buying over the next several years. The question is: Have they embraced .Co?
I think one could also interpret those numbers as a 75% drop in registrations.
“Blended Renewal rate” smells like bullshit and lipstick.
The problem with .co figures is that there are none. The registry does not publish reliable statistics upon which the health of the ccTLD could be measured. And the development and usage figures that the registry publishes are more like an Astrology column than genuine development and usage statistics. The reality is that the figures that the registry publishes (it does not actually do the categorisation itself) ignore the prominence of Godaddy’s PPC landing page for undeveloped domains and hide this high level of PPC parking as a generic redirect.
While the .co might be the choice of some start-ups, there is a major consolidation trend underway in the domain business with registration volume becoming concentrated on .com and the local ccTLDs and this concentration is at the expense of the non-core TLDs.
There is also what can be termed an “abandonment” issue where someone registers a domain, installs WordPress posts a single article and then doesn’t bother to update the site. Even in healthy and well developed TLDs, abandoned or non-updated websites that don’t change from year to year can account for between 15% to 22% of websites.
The last time I ran a major web survey of .co websites, there were more websites redirected to the .com or local ccTLD websites than developed websites. While that was approximately eleven months ago, it indicated that .co was on the way to becoming a Gateway TLD (one where a visitor to a website is more likely to be redirected to the relevant ccTLD or .com website and where brand protection registrations are prominent) like .eu ccTLD. At least the hype about .co being a .com killer has died away for the moment.
CO domain name I believe we can become powerful, and I already have a number of quality CO domain name