Big brands such as Twitter and Amazon wanting shorter Internet addresses or small companies unable to obtain their preferred .com address are buying up Colombian domain names.
Colombia now has one million registered Internet addresses, way up from the 28,000 the country registered one year ago. Colombian Internet entrepreneur and chief executive officer of .CO Internet, the registry operator for the .co top level domain, Diego Calle said, “It’s globally recognizable, it’s short, and it’s got an incredible technology behind it.”
Calle, raised $5 million to set up the Miami-based .CO Internet company and won the government contract to operate the .co domain.
He explained that the principal customers of his company are small businesses who cannot obtain their desired .com because of the saturation of the market — some 9 million .com domain names have been registered according to the report. In addition, large companies such as Twitter, Amazon and Overstock have scooped up .co domains at prices as high as $350,000 (for the Overstock purchase) disclosed the company.
The shorter the domain name the more attractive to the customer and therefore the more expensive explained the CEO who told Reuters, “After Amazon and after a few of the other deals that we’ve done over the past few months, the price of one character is already north of $1.5 million,”
Other countries with attractive domain names are also cashing in. Television stations are reportedly snatching up domains on the Polynesian island of Tuvalu (.tv) and Montenegro’s .me is becoming popular for smartphone apps the report states.