If you are watching the men’s NCAA basketball tournament (aka March Madness), you may have spotted a Google Cloud television commercial that highlights the company’s G.CO domain name. MarkMonitor VP Statton Hammock took a photo of his television to catch the tail end of Google’s television spot with the url:
Nice domain https://t.co/TRp6GTMYL7 @Google @NeustarTLDs Where is .basketball? #domains pic.twitter.com/QzlynyNaYP
— Statton Hammock (@StattonHammock) March 22, 2019
At the end of July, Sedo hosted a special .CO domain name auction. The auction concluded on August 2nd, and I received the results of the auction to share with readers.
Vegas.CO was the largest sale at $18,500 followed by Hire.CO at $10,099. The third largest auction was Weather.CO, which sold for $9,999. In total, nearly $80,000 worth of .CO domain names were sold in this auction.
The results of the auction are listed below. Because the auction closed a week ago, it is very likely that many of these sales have not yet closed. Once they close, Sedo will report them to DNJournal and NameBio for archiving.
Sedo’s .CO auction results:
In honor of the .CO registry’s 8th birthday, Sedo will be hosting what is billed as a Premium .CO domain name auction starting on July 26 and running through August 2. I was told the domain names in the auction are owned by Sedo clients. I was also told that Sedo would consider adding super premium .CO domain names if customers are interested in listing them. Some of the .CO domain names names included in the auction are:
If these domain names were in the .com extension, we would be talking into the
Several days ago, I reported that the S.CO domain name was acquired by MarkMonitor on behalf of a client. Because the Whois registrant information listed MarkMonitor’s privacy proxy service (DNStination Inc.) as the registrant, it was unknown who was behind the brand protection company’s acquisition.
This morning, a reader named Davis noticed that the S.CO domain name was activated, revealing that Snapchat appears to be the buyer of S.CO. If you visit S.CO right now, you will be redirected to Snapchat’s homepage.
I did some Twitter searching, and I do not see any mentions of the S.CO domain name by Snapchat or any other Twitter user. This isn’t surprising because the company likely hasn’t announced how the domain name will be used. I would not be surprised to see
It looks like the S.CO domain name changed hands at the end of last week or over the weekend. According to Whois records at DomainTools, S.CO is now registered to DNStination Inc., the proxy provider for MarkMonitor, a brand protection and domain registration company. As of right now, S.CO resolves to a generic GoDaddy landing page.
I believe S.CO was sold by GoDaddy / NameFind, although the purchase price for the domain name will not be revealed per GoDaddy’s policy. Earlier this year, Jamie Zoch reported that GoDaddy “acquired the premium domains held by the .co registry (likely ALL of the remaining ones they held)” via its NameFind business. There were quite a few single letter .CO domain names in that portfolio, including S.CO.
Back in 2012, S.CO had been used by Startup America, an organization that was co-founded by America Online founder Steve Case. At the time, it was announced that the organization would rebrand its url from StartupAmericaPartnership.org to the shorter S.CO domain name. It looks like the organization reverted back to StartupAmericaPartnership.org, although I am not sure when that happened. My guess is that the organization didn’t acquire the domain name from the .CO Registry.
According to NameBio, there have been
Google’s parent company Alphabet runs a division called X. For X, the “mission is to invent and launch “moonshot” technologies that we hope could someday make the world a radically better place.” In an announcement made on its X.company blog, the launch of Dandelion was announced. According to the blog post, “Dandelion will offer geothermal heating and cooling systems to homeowners, starting in the northeastern United States.”
From a domain name perspective, the announcement is interesting. Dandelion is using the Dandelion.CO domain name instead of a .com domain name. Dandelion.com is registered to someone in New York City, and it is unrelated to X’s Dandelion.
NameBio shows that Dandelion.CO last sold in 2013
