.Co Domains Venture

A couple of years ago I registered and hosted several domains with godaddy.com for a company I incorporated in Bahrain last year. Godaddy, therefore, keeps sending me emails and news letters all the time. 

A couple of weeks ago they sent me an email about the public availability of the .co domains - which used to be the national domain extension for the Republic of "Colombia" in Latin America. "A lot of bloggers mistakingly call it Columbia!"

I logged in to my account with godaddy.com and checked my family name domain "dajani.co" and it was there! I was probably one of the early people to notice this public availability, so I immediately registered my domain - and was happy that I did - and then I said: why don't I check the availability of other brand names here in Saudi Arabia.

I was blown away by the availability of major family businesses and public companies names still to be registered, so within a week I worked with a colleague of mine to pick a hundred domain names to register them. 

I sketched an Excel sheet with about 250 names  80% of which were available, but due to my travel during the weekend to Bahrain and when I came back to Riyadh on Saturday and discussed the proposed names with my business partner, and finally arrived to a list of about a hundred names yesterday, I discovered that 5 of the big names I was hoping to register were snatched during the last 72 hours. Those names of the local major Mercedes Benz, BMW, GM, Nissan dealers in Saudi Arabia were gone.

So, this morning my friend and I invested over $2,000 in registering over 80 brand names, whether Saudi Public companies domains like ncci.co, Saudi family businesses like xenel.co, Saudi private companies like tazaj.co, and finally good general domain names like istithmar.co (Istithmar means Investment).

So, today I started a new venture, although didn't cost me more than 1% of my last venture, but I am betting that the future of the .co domains will be a lot better than .ME, and I strongly believe that, with time passing, .co will climb up the ladder to be second only to .com, if it didn't top it.

After securing the registration of the domain names, the next stage is to market them to the best potential customers, which we're planning to start right away and finish it - hopefully - in 2 months or so. Later on, whichever didn't sell will be auctioned on godaddy.com itself and in Saudi newspapers and specialized websites.

What pushed me even further to take a quick Go! decision with this project is that Google approved .co domains for international use, meaning they will be available in any search from any location on the planet, just like .com, .net, .org ..etc.

In the future posts, if we hit the jackpot - if I may use the expression - I shall post the results of this venture in this blog.