MarkMonitor Client Acquires S.CO

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 three publicly reported single letter / number .CO domain name sales:

• o.co $350,000
• e.co $81,000
• 8.co $115,000

I have no idea what GoDaddy / NameFind is asking for its single letter .CO domain names, but if I had to guess, I would say this was a mid to high 5 figure sale (assuming it was sold). If the deal was higher than this amount, it would probably benefit GoDaddy to release the sale price since the company appears to own other single letter .CO domain names.

I will keep my eye on how S.CO is used. I wouldn’t be surprised if a big company acquired the domain name to use it in the same way Google uses G.CO, Twitter uses T.CO, and GoDaddy uses X.CO. We shall see.