.CO’s administrators have aggressively marketed the extension unlike any before it. In the year since they made .CO available for worldwide registration, Juan Diego Calle, .CO Internet S.A.S CEO, and his team have experimented with a Super Bowl ad, lent Twitter t.co (its official URL shortener) for free, pursued major event sponsorships, and even ran a charity auction. They’ve also built video case studies about using .CO, purchased billboard ad space, and held startup contests.

“If we had ended with 500,000 registrations I would have been pleased. We’re ending the year with over 1 million registrations our first year. Clearly it exceeded our expectations,” Juan said about the company’s growth. “Going directly and talking to our users has worked.”

With all its interconnected marketing channels, ads and partnerships (at a cost of $10 million so far – 40% of .CO’s revenue), this is certainly not your typical domain extension marketing strategy, if a typical one can be said to exist. Case in point: Competitor and behemoth .COM has claimed roughly 95 million active domains on little more than the assumption that you’ll want a .COM address the most – a habit .CO seeks to disrupt.

.CO has an ambitious goal of persuading 3 to 5 million individuals and businesses to register a .CO address by year 5 of its life. But with ICANN’s recent decision to allow almost any domain extension, can this young company move quickly enough to become – and stay – the next extension of choice?

Changing a Utility into a Platform

Columbia-based .CO Internet S.A.S incorporated in 2009 to bid for the right to operate .CO, officially owned by the country of Columbia, with regulatory oversight coming from its Ministry of Communications. The 1,165 page plan Juan and his team presented to the Ministry beat out such giants as VeriSign, which owns the rights to .COM and .NET.

Juan said domain extensions (.COM, .ORG, .BIZ, .NET, etc) have traditionally been viewed as nothing more than a piece of Internet infrastructure. “We felt that .CO is really a platform for people to build their dreams and aspirations online. The core of our entire company is built around that very simple statement… It’s really about marketing in a way that inspires innovation and creativity on the Web.”

Selling this idea comes out in the form of what Juan said are three pillars: Awareness, Distribution, and Demonstrated Use. In short, .CO 1) wants to spread global awareness 2) have .CO distributed widely across Internet domain registrars such as Go Daddy 3) and show through example how successful companies using .CO have been.

That third pillar includes such heavyweights as Overstock.COm (now rebranded as O.CO), Amazon, which bought a.co, AngelList (and its ownership of Angel.co), and of course, Twitter’s use of t.co. “Landing a deal with Twitter was very important… It gave us immediate credibility that the .CO extension is secure… People may have been challenged because they haven’t seen any of the major brands using it.”

.CO also promotes the availability of domain names you can no longer find with .COM, not only because it is so new, but because the company actively discourages domain squatters and speculators through price (“We’re not the cheapest domain extension out there,” Juan said) and through its work regarding rights protections for brand owners.

“Fifty percent or more of .COM domains are owned by either domain investors or cybersquatters,” Juan said. “In the case of .CO, our premium pricing model minimizes speculation and cybersquatting.  Simply put, individuals in those businesses prefer domain extensions where the entry cost (i.e., their financial risk) is lower.”

A New World Post-Dot Com

A few weeks ago, ICANN introduced a revolutionary change for the web: As of 2012, anyone – with $185,000 for fees – can apply to ICANN to have a new domain name suffix created (think .COKE, .CANON, or .UNICEF). It may become standard, Juan said, to navigate for health-related content within .HEALTH websites or shopping within .SHOP websites. “In essence, internet content and services will become more fragmented and categorized by domain extensions.”

“We’ve learned to associate the word Internet to be synonymous with the world of ‘.COM’.  In the next decade or so, that perception will change dramatically and individuals worldwide will begin to see the internet as a collection of spaces (i.e., worlds), each made up by a different domain extension,” he said.

“Interestingly as well, it won’t look too different from the real world.  Just like one can find ghettos and safe neighborhoods in any given city, on the internet you will encounter an unsafe space in a certain extension and a thriving community in another.”

Juan and .CO’s response to the possible flood of competition is a bit counter-intuitive: He embraces the change. “If all of a sudden ICANN suddenly introduces hundreds of extensions… then everyone around the world would realize it’s not just about .COM. In that new environment, we feel .CO will be that much more competitive.”

(However, Juan admits the timing of the announcement somewhat affects his opinion: “I wouldn’t have been as excited [if ICANN announced the news] around the time that we launched… It would have muddied the waters for us. Certainly glad it happened after we launched.”)

Although their focus remains firmly on .CO, the company’s director Lori Anne Wardi said they’ve already been asked about plans to bid, found and run new domain extensions once ICANN begins accepting proposals.

“We’re very uniquely positioned,” Lori Anne said. “We’re being approached on a weekly basis asking if we want to partner with [various companies] because we’ve just done it… There are very few companies who have launched registries successfully.”

Juan said they have no firm plans to jump in on the domain extension rush, but they will keep exploring options. “It’s definitely something we’re grappling with because it’s going to change the landscape… It’s a matter of daily discussion.”

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