[kictanet] Country Domain Names Becoming Source of Revenue

[Alice Munyua]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/technology/07dotco.html


  Country Domain Names Becoming Source of Revenue


            By ERIC PFANN
            <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/eric_pfanner/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

The keystroke-saving shortcut is possible because the government of 
Montenegro makes its “country code top-level domain” — the .me suffix — 
available to commercial and private Internet users, for a fee. Facebook 
and other companies have snapped up such addresses to help draw more 
users to their sites — or to prevent rivals from doing so.

The sale of country codes by governments that got lucky when the endings 
were allocated, securing two-letter combinations that double as widely 
recognized words or symbols, is not new. The island nation of Tuvalu, 
for example, has sold its code, .tv, for more than a decade.

With a few exceptions, Internet addresses that end with country codes 
have failed to catch on with consumers, and .com remains the suffix of 
choice for marketers seeking to establish their Web credentials. But now 
companies that market country codes like .me, .tv and .co, for Colombia, 
are stepping up their efforts to sell them worldwide.

“The opportunity for us is to become the platform of choice for 
entrepreneurs around the world,” said Juan Diego Calle, chief executive 
of .CO Internet, a Miami-based company that operates the .co registry 
under license from the Colombian government. “To do that, we want to 
build massive awareness.”

One reason for the renewed push is a shortage of potential names ending 
with the most widely used domain suffix, .com. More than 90 million .com 
addresses are already in use, and the companies that sell them say few 
letter combinations are still available.

Another reason is a liberalization of the domain name system. The 
Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that 
oversees Internet addresses, recently made it possible to create domain 
names in non-Latin alphabets, including Cyrillic and Arabic; next year, 
the organization wants to make it possible to create all sorts of new 
endings, like .paris or .shopping. Countries like Colombia and 
Montenegro want to get in before their country codes are lost in the crowd.

For cash-strapped governments, the sale of country code domain names is 
also a nice little earner. Colombia, for example, gets 25 percent of the 
revenue from sales of the .co name under its deal with .CO Internet. 
Last year, the company generated a total of $20 million from the sale of 
.co domains; this year, that is expected to rise to more than $30 
million, Mr. Calle said.

More than 600,000 .co addresses have been sold, in more than 200 
countries, he said. Only about 20,000 of those are actually from 
Colombia, with the most interest coming from the United States and Europe.

The company predicts that the total number of .co registrations will 
rise to five million within five years. Mr. Calle is hoping for a surge 
of interest after a high-profile marketing pitch over the weekend. 
During the Super Bowl 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/super_bowl/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>, 
the championship game of American football, the world’s largest domain 
name registrar, Go Daddy, was set to highlight .co in an advertisement — 
featuring, as is typical of the company’s cheesy but attention-grabbing 
spots, “Go Daddy girls” in tight T-shirts and hot pants. In advance of 
the game, Go Daddy said it planned to introduce a new member of the 
team, a “.co girl.”

While some country codes have had a hard time attracting anything other 
than niche interest, analysts say the Colombian suffix may have a better 
chance to rival .com because the letters “co” are recognized in many 
languages as an abbreviation for “company” and are not merely seen as an 
abbreviation for the country’s name.

“As long as it doesn’t become well-known that it’s just a bastardization 
of the country code for Colombia, it could take off,” said Josh Bourne, 
managing partner of FairWinds Partners, which advises companies on the 
use of domain names.

Many of the names with suffixes like .co or .me are simply defensive 
registrations by companies that want to prevent practices like 
“cybersquatting” or “domain name parking” — that is, the registration of 
their name by a third party that essentially holds it for ransom.

To prevent that, the operators of a new top-level domain like .co are 
now generally required to let brand or trademark owners register their 
own names during a so-called sunrise period. As a result, the address 
apple.co <http://apple.co/>, for example, automatically redirects 
traffic to the company’s main site, apple.com <http://apple.com/>.

Some companies have been making more creative use of country code domain 
endings. Like Facebook, a number of well-known Web sites have used them 
for abbreviated addresses; these include Overstock.com 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/overstockcom-inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
an online retailer, which recently added a shorter address, o.co 
<http://o.co/>, using the Colombian country code.

DoMEn, the company that operates the .me registry, has been promoting 
the use of .me for social media sites and bloggers, seeing it as a 
natural appendage for people who want to tell the world about 
themselves. The suffix has been employed, for example, by About.me 
<http://about.me/>, a start-up that lets users create personal profile 
pages that aggregate their presence on other social networking services; 
About.me <http://about.me/> was acquired by AOL 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/aol/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
in December.

Other country codes that have been adopted for similar uses include .at 
(Austria), .cc (Cocos Islands) and .tm (Turkmenistan.)

Yet not every country is eager to see its two-letter code adopted by 
marketers all over the world. France, for example, requires users of .fr 
to have a physical presence in the country.

“Some countries wanted to keep their domains clean and restrictive, but 
most of them have given up on that by now, in the search for additional 
revenue,” Mr. Bourne said.

While some of the companies selling country code domain names play down 
their affiliation with the countries that own the rights to these 
endings, seeing it as a barrier to wider international adoption, that is 
not the case for doMEn.

“It’s a good promotion for Montenegro, said Natasa Djukanovic, 
international sales director at DoMEn. “A lot of people who didn’t even 
know we existed now know where we are.”


            A version of this article appeared in print on February 7,
            2011, in The International Herald Tribune.

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