Learned the hard way: .co won’t replace .com

At the start of this year, the American online retailer Overstock cut a deal with the .co-registry to get hold of the domain name o.co. They were allowed to register this fancy domain name in return of running an expensive promotion campaign for their new brand o.co, which was supposed to also give the .co-extension more credibility. It looks like this has now backfired to both parties.O.co has just announced that (at least for the holiday season) they will go back to their old name Overstock.com. The reason was very simple: too many people wanting to visit O.co actually typed in O.com. This made them end up on an error-message instead of the retailers website, because the one-letter domain name o.com is currently blocked from registration.

So better think twice before you buy a fancy .co domain name assuming you have dug up gold. Many visitors will actually end up on the .com-version of the name you just bought. And in your case, that .com might even be run by your competitor.