.CO

In yesterday’s post about Sam Adams using a X.CO url shortener on the back of its New Albion Ale bottles, someone wrote a comment that is important enough to share a follow up post. If you use X.CO, you need to be mindful of capitalization.

According to Mike H and confirmed by me:

The x.co shortener is case sensitive, it looks like they are aware of this as the took x.co/newalbion as well as x.co/NewAlbion, but if a person were to type it in as advertised (all capitalized) they wouldn’t go to Sam Adams. The capitalized version isn’t claimed.

Luckily for Sam Adams and its New Albion Ale product / marketing managers, someone from Go Daddy saw my post yesterday and added the capitalized version to the company’s account, preventing someone else from capturing that traffic and forwarding it elsewhere.

If you are using X.CO for marketing purposes, especially if the marketing is done offline, you need to be sure you grab all versions of the keyword. Someone else could anonymously register (for free) the alternative versions and forward them elsewhere. It doesn’t cost you anything to do, and it can protect your interests or the interests of you clients.

Thanks again to Mike H. for the tip.

I frequently see references to Go Daddy’s X.CO url shortener in various articles and elsewhere online. It’s not as popular as Bitly or T.CO shorteners that are more commonly used on Twitter, but I do see it somewhat regularly. However, I don’t recall seeing an X.CO reference offline, until I saw this Samuel Adams New Albion Ale beer bottle.

I have no idea where my brother bought this six pack, but he said it was a special beer. It tasted pretty unique, but I didn’t think all that much of it until i saw the secondary label on the back of the bottle directing people to X.CO/NewAlbion. When you visit the url, you’re taken to a website with a Samuel Adams logo and a video with information about the beer.

It’s an interesting choice of a url, especially because X.com is a functioning website, and obviously if you visit that particular webpage in a .com, it’s a 404 error. Although Overstock saw traffic leakage with O.CO, at least that traffic ended up visiting a non existent website.

Anyway, I found the Sam Adams / New Albion beer interesting, and I found the url choice even more interesting, and I wanted to share it with you.

It’s been a pretty good week for the .CO Registry and companies that are betting on the success of .CO domain names.

The first bit of great news came in the form of a tweet from Juan Diego Calle, CEO of .CO Internet S.A.S, the company that operates the .CO Registry. Yesterday, Calle announced that there are now 1.5 million .CO domain names registered. 1.5 million domain names registered is no joke, and it’s certainly better than most naysayers would believe.

If you read TechCrunch daily, you probably know the second bit of good news. Five start up companies that use .CO domain names for their brands have been featured on TechCrunch in the previous several days. Mailstrom.CO,  Fosbury.CO,  Simpler.CO, Vine.CO,  ShopInterest.CO, and Angel.CO  have all been written about or discussed on TechCrunch since Sunday. I briefly looked, and aside from .com, no other domain extension has had more mentions than .CO.

The .CO Registry hasn’t rested on its laurels one bit since launching a few years ago. The company sponsors a wide variety of conferences and meetups in the tech space, and they treat founders and management of .CO-using companies very well. .The .CO Registry truly understands that .CO is much more of a brand than a ccTLD, and they market it in that manner.

I know that some domain investors would like to see larger and more frequently reported .CO domain sales, but just as importantly, the .CO brand is popular among startups and others looking for a .com alternative. This demand will help increase values, and I am sure owners of top quality .CO domain names receive offers for their names. Sure, they might not see 6 figure offers as they might if they owned the matching .com, but they certainly didn’t pay the same amount they would have paid for the matching .com.

Congratulations to the .CO Registry for hitting another big milestone. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them hit 2 million registrations after next year’s .CO focused Super Bowl commercial.