Following in Twitter (T.co) and Overstock’s (O.co’s) footsteps, Amazon has picked up the domains A.Co, Z.Co, K.Co and interestingly enough Cloud.co in a deal made with Colombia-based domain registry .Co.
While .Co originally gave Twitter the T.Co domain name for free in order to spread awareness about the brand, Amazon has actually purchased these from .Co for an undisclosed price. In comparison, Overstock’s O.Co rebranding was the first negotiated .Co purchase deal, for $350K ( Godaddy also owns the name X.Co, using it as a vanity link shortening service).
The genesis of the .Co domain is through Colombia, and while country codes usually take a hit in Google rankings, .Co is part of a unique set of cclds (.tv .me .co) which are treated like gtlds or generic domains like .com .net .org.
.Co is about to hit its 1 millionth domain registered in little under a year of service (.com is at over a hundred million) and is about to set up a stable pricing plan for one letter and two letter domains.
Co representative Lori Anne Wardi tells me, “With every allocation of a single letter domain name the pool of these gets less and less, with every sale we do the resource becomes smaller. We have a very long list of people who want one letter and two letter domains and price will be set high enough that each person who buys one of these will use it.”
While .Co wouldn’t tell me what Amazon will do with these domains it did emphasize that they will absolutely be utilized, “I’m confident that they’ll do something interesting, ” said Wardi. Cloud.Co will be particularly one to watch as Amazon is at the forefront of the cloud based music wars among other things. K.Co? Well they’ve stumped me on that one.
Unlike the Libyan-based .Ly domain, .Co (with Colombia’s full support) is doing a heavy marketing push towards appealing to startups and entrepreneurs, “We’re not looking for a major brand to switch over to .co, but every day new companies are starting and can’t get the domain name that they want,” says Wardi. “We want to be the domain of the next Twitter and the next Facebook.”
Update: As our commenters have pointed out below, it’s likely A.Co is for Amazon, Z.Co is for Zappos and K.Co is for Kindle.