Will .co change the Domaining World?

There are two ways to look at the upcoming launch of .co – a new opportunity for Domainers – or a legal nightmare for companies and trademark owners. As you all know I am forever an optimist so like to find the positive aspects of situation before focusing on the negative – so I’ll start there!

.co has a lot of potential in a key area that I think many people may not see right-away. There are lots of great .com domains that are left undeveloped with useless parking pages on what should be prime real estate. Need some examples? Take a look at genetics.com or doctors.com – these are great, one-word generic .com’s being used for nothing. Most likely the owners of these domains have been lazy because they make plenty of money from domain parking.

This is where I see the potential for .co domains – to actually provide useful information on .com domains that are parked and unavailable to developers who could actually put useful information on the domain due to the high price of this .com real estate. Just think – Doctors.co could actually provide information about Doctors – it could be a major resource online for people looking for information about Doctors – just like Doctors.com should be!

This is the great positive potential I see for .co and a step towards providing more useful content online. Of course – there is also a big legal nightmare that comes with .co. Plenty of people out there will register .co domains to get the type-in traffic from legitimate, useful websites. In some cases they will deceive the user and make them think they are actually at the site they indended to reach.

All I can say here is that I hope all Domainers stay focused on investing and not squatting on other people’s company names and trademarks. In the end try to make your money by providing valuable resources online rather than monetizing another company’s hard work.

One thing is for sure – .co does have the potential to change the Domaining world and open the door to some incredible domains with strong type-in traffic – the question is – will this new power be used for good, or evil? Only you can make that decision.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton