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:
- vegas.co $18,500
- hire.co $10,099
- weather.co $9,999
- blackjack.co $6,000
- healthcare.co $4,999
- debt.co $3,900
- card.co $3,555
- map.co $3,056
- store.co $2,855
- holiday.co $2,850
- legal.co $2,500
- bets.co $1,700
- accounting.co $1,610
- gravy.co $1,002
- gamble.co $1,000
- cabs.co $1,000
- survey.co $999
- answer.co $999
- venturecapital.co $999
- ledge.co $800
- rom.co EUR 500
- abx.co $499
- formulas.co $499
I was planning to bid on some .co domains, but finally I didn’t because of technical problems and delays. Lately Sedo manages to mess up really everything. Parking stats are delayed, their site functions bug, and they are not even able to run an auction on schedule. I have enough of the Sedo fails, WTF solutions and poor excuses. What a bunch of amateurs!
These sales are really depressive, .co used to do much better. Although since its Sedo, I believe none of these are end-user sales. Anyway, they are on their way to become a stupid zone by holding expired names even after expiration, so they deserve to go down in flames and disappear from the market.
I don’t think mid-summer was the best time to hold a .co auction. We’ll probably see some of these sell for much higher in the future. For example, you often see random LLL.co sell for higher than survey.co or gamble.co went for. Better to hold your .co and wait for the perfect buyer, than try to auction it off.
.co/.io are losing relevance and even .net is fading with so many new gtlds like .app. i suggest sticking with .com or .org when appropriate and forgetting about lame “generic” cctld alternatives like .co.
These prices are not bad, actually. I won fax.co at Sedo auction back in 2011 for $2K. That is comparable to these and it’s 7 years later.
Cool… i use fax.co for ALL my faxing needs.
abx.co $49 must be a typo? Went to email but the link under “about the author” is not working.
Thanks for the good read!
Thanks for catching that – it was a typo. It should have been $499.
How many end users are actually using .co or advertising .co. , other than in Colombia, which was the intended purpose of .co anyway. I don’t get the fascination, other than using it for Colombia , on the other hand there are non-repurposed cctlds like .co.uk and .co.in that have huge brand backing in their respective countries.
Valuations of cctlds will directly correlate to usage by end users not by domainer interest alone
One reason that .CO auction prices were so low could be due to how the auction was publicized (or wasn’t). As someone who has been on Sedo almost every day for the last month, I’ve seen plenty of announcements about the action, but no links anywhere to the auction page.
On July 12, Andrew Allemann wrote an article about competition in the domain industry, in which he expressed his concern for Sedo’s ability to remain a strong and viable competitor to its cross-town rival. As someone who has been involved in several IT-company turnaround situations, very few of which were successful, I share Andrew’s concern. The danger signs are hard to miss.
As a buyer on Sedo, I have no complaints, but as a seller it looks as if they are diverging too much from standard software-industry practices. Their happy paths are a mess. The number of taps (or clicks) that it can take to perform an operation are sometimes excessive (e.g., after deleting a domain), and the UDRP liabilities associated with their parking pages are scary, to say the least.
The advantages that Sedo provides in terms of traffic metrics and its reseller network are second to none. In this industry, however, if you are not moving forward—then you are falling behind.