<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff">
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/technology/07dotco.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/technology/07dotco.html</a><map
name="prmap9D9B0400C809EE3502094FD0004D0000">
<area shape="rect" coords="0,0,728,90"
id="p9D9B0400C809EE3502094FD0004D00001prareaid"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/technology/07dotco.html#">
</map>
<noscript></noscript>
<div class="columnGroup first">
<h1 class="articleHeadline">Country Domain Names Becoming Source
of Revenue</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/eric_pfanner/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More Articles by Eric Pfanner" class="meta-per">ERIC
PFANN</a></h6>
<div class="articleBody">
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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 <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/super_bowl/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"
title="More articles about the Super Bowl."
class="meta-classifier">Super Bowl</a>, 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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
target="_" href="http://apple.co/">apple.co</a>, for
example, automatically redirects traffic to the company’s main
site, <a moz-do-not-send="true" target="_"
href="http://apple.com/">apple.com</a>. </p>
<p>
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
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/overstockcom-inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More information about Overstock.com Incorporated"
class="meta-org">Overstock.com</a>, an online retailer,
which recently added a shorter address, <a
moz-do-not-send="true" target="_" href="http://o.co/">o.co</a>,
using the Colombian country code. </p>
<p>
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 <a moz-do-not-send="true" target="_"
href="http://about.me/">About.me</a>, a start-up that lets
users create personal profile pages that aggregate their
presence on other social networking services; <a
moz-do-not-send="true" target="_" href="http://about.me/">About.me</a>
was acquired by <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/aol/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More articles about AOL LLC." class="meta-org">AOL</a>
in December. </p>
<p>
Other country codes that have been adopted for similar uses
include .at (Austria), .cc (Cocos Islands) and .tm
(Turkmenistan.) </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<div class="articleCorrection">
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="columnGroup ">
<div class="articleFooter">
<div class="articleMeta">
<div class="opposingFloatControl wrap">
<div class="element1">
<h6 class="metaFootnote">A version of this article
appeared in print on February 7, 2011, in The
International Herald Tribune.</h6>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>