.CO Gets (Free) NASCAR Exposure

Brandt is an agriculture company that “helps farmers mitigate risk.” The company recently changed its website url to Brandt.CO, and it appears that they are using their NASCAR sponsorship to get the word out. As you can see, the new url is prominently located on the hood of the #31 car, driven by  Justin Allgaier (photo from Brandt racing website).

Last year, the car’s hood only said “Brandt Professional Agriculture” and this year, the Brandt.CO url sits in front of the “Professional Agriculture” tagline. Now if only the racing team would ditch the long, hyphenated brandt-inc-racing.com domain name for its website, the company would be better off.

Interestingly, Brandt.com is owned by a French company that does not appear to offer similar products or services. Hopefully, NASCAR fans will note the url change and not visit the other site. Wonder if the .CO url will be prominent on t-shirts, hats, and other branded NASCAR paraphernalia. In my opinion, it’s doubtful that the .CO Registry had anything to do with the placement (confirmed).

Someone also posted an article about this on Namepros.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

44 COMMENTS

  1. .Co

    is now the preferred way to go.

    I see everyday big huge companies switching their entire site from .com over to go .Co

    I see fully developed site on .Co and the .com is a fricken parked site.

  2. Looks like they ran out of money and couldn’t afford the letter m. And what was mentioned earlier, most of this traffic will go to brandt.com, nice French site.

  3. one of the common mistakes that everyone on this board makes is that you think you are better, smarter than the average person.

    when in fact the average person is smarter than you, I and everyone on this board.

    do not underestimate people.

    if you know it, you can pretty much assume the average person will know it as well.

    why do you think that 98% of the time the audience gets the answer right on the Millionaire show. it is because the average person is almost never wrong.

    so for you idiots to think that the average surfer is dumb and will fall over to .com is dumb of people writing here.

    the real effect that people on here is, oh I am so insure with my .com holdings and the great news .Co has been getting I better say something dirt so people will think less of .Co that’s what you are really wanting to say.

    come on, speak the truth. don’t cover is disguise.

    .Co only gets stronger by each day.

  4. “it is because the average person is almost never wrong.”

    That’s a silly comment but let’s play along with it for awhile. The “average person” didn’t take to o.co, it was nothing but co nfusion, hence that failure. That you think people won’t be going to .com out of habit typing .com, is you lacking some basic understanding. I think you must be a rookie that felt left out of the .com goldrush, trying to reinvent it with this one. As they say with fools and their money, a lot of average people at that.

  5. I saw a local mattress company with a .co domain the other day on the side of a huge box van. Verlo! Oh wait, some jackass hit a building with the side of the truck and it rubbed off the M. LOL (true story)

  6. @johnie

    oh, there’s a bell curve also on the average person and

    you fall in the bottome 2.5 percent among the <65IQ

    O.Co is still being built up. Rome isn't built in one year.

    People now days don't even type the extension.

    There is something called auto-fill

    you may have heard of it. so once you start typing it auto-fills in the sites you go to most often.

    people never type the extension when they visit sites.

    that is old school thinking.

    so you are stuck when we had to type in laboriously every exact letter to get to a http://www. address. Yeah, I remember those days. and people ain't typing out all that anymore. are you kidding me.

    things have changed.

  7. Robert. Take the blinkers off. .COM is still number one. All statistics from any reputable source show this.

    O.co continues to lose traffic to a reserved o.com domain. For over 20 years, .com has been etched into the minds of all American consumers. It will take a long, arduous process to change this.

    By the way, my iq is 129.

  8. Robert Cline’s repetitive babble aside, it’s pretty cool to see a domain featured in this way. I still get a kick out of seeing .ME and .TV in ads (heck, I remember seeing a .CC on a billboard in Ohio, and had to do a double-take.

    Of course the .COM is the better name. But I’ve run across some pretty awkward, hyphenated, and hard-to-remember .coms, .nets, and .orgs as well, by companies who were desperate to include keywords in their URL but didn’t have the foresight (or budget) to get the more succinct, more valuable one or two-word .com. I can see the appeal of .CO in that case. I’m not saying there isn’t brand confusion and a host of other potential issues, but as far as domains go, there are worse options out there.

  9. Robert, for our sake I hope you register every .co imaginable, so that it limits the amount of .co pushers on this blog. I can’t imagine sifting through your comments plus ten other .co cheerleaders.

  10. @Devon

    come on.

    The fact of the matter is .com is f***en broken.

    There are more fricken parked junk sites, malware, spyware, virus on .com than anywhere.

    upgrade your site to a more complete secure recognizable .Co brand.

  11. @ Robert:

    Please stop. There’s no reason to post 4 comments in a row. You actually HURT the extension when you do this, because your arguments are invalid and nobody takes you seriously.

  12. Robert Cline may be a clown and all, but the last examples he’s posted represent a real situation: new brands looking for a recognizable domain that don’t want to settle for what is left in .com. The Registry has been leveraging this situation pretty well.

  13. @ Robert

    Your “examples” make no sense and your comments frequently ruin blog posts.

    What are you trying to show exactly?
    That some .CO is developed when the better .COM is not?

    Big deal. It has nothing to do with .CO.

    I can show developed sites in any extensions where the better .COM is not developed.

    Brad

  14. @Robert, I say that .co is an intentionally confusing extension that has been marketed (albeit brilliantly) to a handful of individuals or businesses who either think it’s the new gold rush or feel they suddenly now HAVE to register out of fear of brand confusion, or (more probable) people who have a complete misunderstanding of the hazards of owning a confusing extension. It’s not like .xxx or any other extension. It’s very unique. It’s one freaking character off from it’s big brother, the time-tested, .com. Truth is, if you feel THAT strongly about .co, you wouldn’t have to continually post your viewpoints on it, defending your investments on every other post here. The more likely scenario is that you’d just be quietly making money with all of your .co purchases. The irony is that you keep pushing and pushing .co on a very successful .com blog ran by an owner who invests 99% of his time in nothing but .com’s and continues to do so. There is and will be some money to be made with a .co, so I’ll agree to that. However, your paradigm shift .co extension theory is nothing but fail, I’m afraid. You have the spirit and the preaching tendencies of a Rick Schwartz, but the difference is that I think you might be riding in the wrong investment vehicle.

  15. Robert, if you genuinely believe what you say, why not just settle back and watch while the rest of us are proven wrong. Then you can come back and remind us all of how right you were…surely that would be more satisfying than what you’re doing now?
    BTW, love the way you put yourself up there with Jesus – I’m no shrink but I bet that means something!

  16. A 2 day blog with 29 replies, and 14 are by ‘one’ poster, and 9 countering/arguing with him. I’m sorry, what was this blog post about again?

  17. The “average person” didn’t take to o.co, it was nothing but confusion, hence that failure. That you think people won’t be going to .com out of habit typing .com, is you lacking some basic understanding. Really it is major mistake.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Recent Posts

Slice Acquires Slice.com After 8 Years

0
Slice is a company that helps independent pizzerias with technology, marketing, and operations solutions. In fact, I have used Slice when ordering from our...

Afternic: Pending Sync

1
I hand registered 29 domain names at GoDaddy two days ago. I registered them in two swaths - 20 names and 9 names. Afternic...

Candy.com Acquired by Hilco Digital

8
In 2021, the Candy.com domain name was sold for an undisclosed sum in a deal brokered by Andrew Miller of Hilco Digital and Amanda...

Darpan Munjal Doing AMA on X

1
I have always appreciated how Atom.com CEO Darpan Munjal has been willing to share data freely. It's helpful to see what types of domain...

Results from One Month with Afternic Boost

20
Afternic began charging for its upgraded "Boost" features on September 4th. Instead of paying 15% commission for selling a domain name via Afternic with...