Is It Time To Move To .Co And Other Domain Extensions?

Think about your favorite websites; the ones that you visit every day. Now think about the last four keys on your keyboard you push down upon at the very end of each domain… You know, the “.com” keys.

 
Now, what I am going to do for you here is save you a fraction of your day by telling you the newest “thing” in the dot-com era is now the dot-CO (.C0) era. Some of you are probably asking yourselves, “why would companies be using .CO when everybody is already used to dot-com?” Well, it’s because dot-com has been around since the day the internet was launched, and there are too many dot-com domains being utilized.  This leaves the newest innovators and startup companies with limited domain choices that most likely won’t come to peoples minds when they are the searching process for a specific company.

Top .CO Company’s:

1. Angel.co
2. Amex.co
3. Vine.co
4. Hinge.co
5. 500.co
6. Jazz.co
7. Bigquote.co
8. Digit.co
9. Halfbaked.co
10. Jelly.co

Just looking at those 10 popular .CO Company’s, before doing any research I bet you’re able to familiarize yourself with at least 3, right? The funny thing is, if you ‘copy and paste’ those .Co’s into your search bar then you will recognize a lot more than just the 3!
Try it out!
Now that you’ve become more familiar with the up and coming technique of .CO, let’s focus more on how this .CO era is beneficial to companies that have been joining (or crossing over from dot-com’s) since July 2010.
Using a shorter domain is not only easier on the brain, it is also better for SEO according to go.co and because Google has listed .Co as a gccTLD, the searches will be measured evenly on SEO’s against dot-com’s. This huge opportunity for newly introduced domains will grab the attention and the rank companies are seeking and give the website owners the satisfaction they are looking for.

.Co vs .Com

It’s important that you remember, we are not bashing on the .Com era, but trying to help you understand that as technology advances, certain aspects change and this is just one of them.
Now of course there are pro’s to sticking with the original domain of “.Com” but not everyone has that pleasure. For the companies that are fortunate enough to have grabbed the name of their company and pasted it right into the search engine bar with .Com at the end, do considerably well because that is the norm for a majority of us internet searchers. You can see that some companies such as Facebook are going to such lengths to keep consistency with .Com in their domain; even going as far as purchasing the second domain “FB.com” from the company America Farm Bureau Federation.
 

 
Claiming FB.com as their second domain, Facebook spent a whopping $8.5 million in 2011, compared to their original domain Facebook.com for $200,000 back in 2005.
Source: Mashable.com
Ultimately I think it comes down to whether your audience is more tech savvy or not as well as the cost savings or alternative disadvantages of having a longer .Com verse your actual brand .Co domain. So for instance if you can get furniture.co but you would have to get furniturestoreboston.com, instead or some other long .Com name than the .Co might make more sense. However, it really depends on the audience and whether you think they will get the .Co extension quickly enough as opposed to being confused by it.
The other option that many companies do is to buy the .Co and a .Com and route one or the other to whichever you want to use as your main domain giving you more options as to how you might want to market your domain.

.IO vs .COM

Lastly I would like to discuss the other up and coming domain, “.IO”. Used by a mass of tech start-ups, the admissible acronym to Input/Output has existed since 1997. Just like the using of .Co, .IO is shorter than a more common domain such as .Com, it’s on the rise and becoming more recognized by larger companies, and it’s easy to grab the name that you want to choose for your company’s personal domain.
Source: Name.com

Top .IO Companies:

1. Doist.io
2. Recon.io
3. Fluent.io
4. Soup.io
5. Filecloud.io
6. Zip.io
7. Honeybadger.io
8. Sush.io
9. Mostlyserious.io
10. Clarify.io

You can find the rest of these .IO’s on Domaintyper.com. Additionally, if you haven’t already, type in a few of those websites listed above to check out the companies that have had great success with the “not so popular” domains!
.IO seems to be a great domain for high tech companies such as platforms or software that other developers or tech savvy marketers might be using. For instance Recon.io is for tech savvy Twitter marketers. At this juncture I would not suggest a .IO domain for a non heavily tech oriented startup or company as most people familiar with .IO are much more entrenched in the tech world.
Now that we’ve made it here, please feel free to share this post so that others that are indecisive about switching over to a .Co or .IO will now see the bigger picture and can plan what steps to take in the future! Thanks!