We are excited to announce that .co.com will enter the live General Availability registration phase today, Tuesday, July 8th at 16:00 GMT (12 noon EDT). This is a major milestone for .co.com and for our company.

As we look ahead with great anticipation, it is also a good time to reflect on the past few months. Our Landrush registrations were strong. It’s a very competitive market with an increasing number of choices. In this environment, despite our pricing being much higher than many of the new gTLDs, total registrations are now in the single-digit thousands, without deep discounting, giveaways or gimmicks.

.co.com is getting the greatest uptake in the 218 countries where third level names are commonplace (UK, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, Korea, Japan, etc.). Registrants have been able to get the keyword names they’ve wanted, but have long gone in .com or their respective ccTLD.

Some registrants in those countries also realize that a .co.com domain will rank better in global search than a ccTLD (all else being equal). As most of our readers know, ccTLDs rarely rank high in search engines when searches come from someplace other than a company’s home country.

Registrants are also finding that .co.com, unlike new gTLDs, often come with existing traffic they can monetize. That can either be a boost to their existing traffic, or get their new site off to a running start. Traffic is something you typically do not get when registering a new gTLD or a third choice .com or ccTLD.

Having said that, the biggest factor influencing registrants is that .co.com ends in the familiar and popular .com extension. There are still 30 million+ .com ads every year and most of them are hyphenated multi-word, third or fourth choice domains. The .co.com extension provides a chance for companies to get the short memorable keywords that are long gone in .com, and .co, and ccTLDs for that matter.

We’ve been suggesting that registrars show a .co.com in search results when the .com is not available, and there is no strong signal for a new gTLD. Registrars who are doing this are seeing excellent conversion rates, even at the higher Landrush pricing. We’re looking forward to seeing the results when lower General Availability pricing takes effect today.

Most importantly, we are very encouraged to see websites going live. Here are some of the sites that have chosen to brand themselves with a short memorable .co.com domain:

http://Programmer.co.com/
Code recipes for the daily programmer

http://aska.co.com
Geneva-based ASKA provides moving services for valuable assets (“Vauling”)

http://GlobalEnglish.co.com
Hola! Learn English via Skype

http://Quingo.co.com
.co.com gets around… on mobility scooters

New sites appear every day. We’ve been posting and tweeting about them, and will begin featuring them on this website as well. If you see a .co.com “in the wild” please let us know!

Thank you again to those who have registered a .co.com during our Landrush Phase, and to those in the domain name industry who have been so supportive. A special thanks goes to our registrar distribution channel for all their excellent work to promote .co.com during a very busy time for them. More registrars are going live today, with others to follow. We now look forward to continuing our journey with you as we grow the .co.com community.

https://registry.co.com