Well the .CO registry has hit the one year mark and no one knows how many owners renewed their CO domains. I have not been posting on zoop as much as I’d like to, simply because I have been working on my other site – SDCC.CO which has been getting incredible traffic and is ranking #1 for many keywords, and in the top 5 for broader more general words.

While facing renewal fees, I decided to renew ALL my LLL.CO’s and picked up about 10-15 additional domains. 90% of the ones I picked up were triple premium and the others have repeating letters. Every LLL.CO that I picked up was a result of the owner simply not wanting to renew them (renewals ARE alot at over $20 a pop) or they were simply liquidating their domains.

Personally, I think this is a mistake…

I check Sedo and godaddy a few times a week for the latest CO domain sales. A few months ago, it was not common to see LLL.CO domains sell on godaddy. However, in the past few weeks I have been noticing more and more CO domains being sold on sedo AND godaddy.

Here’s an example. 3 months ago I never got any offers on my LLL.CO domains, but within the past 24 hours I have gotten 7.

The first initial offer is always low – from about $20 to $40, then I counter with a resonable selling price and I usually get a counter back – How is this different?
Well, in the past I got about 2-3 LOW offers, when I countered them I never got a reply back.

I am beginning to think that people are starting to realize the value in short CO domains. Personally, I feel that there will be many mid to high xxx lll.co domain sales by the end of 2011, and there could be 1 or 2 mid to high x,xxx.

I have seen LLL.CO domains sell for about $100 on average during this month, July. While in past months, I only found them being sold on forums. I seen many sales right BEFORE it was time to renew. People were buying lll.co’s and then paying $30 to renew them – Is this a smart idea? You bet it is! Most people do NOT want to spend an upfront additional cost, they rather sell the domain and make $50 or so instead of adding $30 to it and possibly selling it for 3-5x.

Will lll.co domains ever sell higher than lll.com? I dont know – but I do know that people love short domains. You cannot get a LLL.COM today for less than $X,XXX. If everyone likes short domains, why wouldn’t they like an EVEN SHORTER Domain? Everthing is speculation right now, but I personally feel that investing in some solid one worded or LLL.CO domains.

Currently there are 71,065 CO domains for sale on Sedo. The current trend has seen at least 1 $10,000+ CO domain sale a week. A few weeks ago, there wer multiple CO domain sales, most of which were sold to one buyer and were booze co domains.

I am always interested in trends and finding out what domains have been sold. Another interest is seeing what people are selling and for how much. I have been sifting through many sedo domains and the results seem to be an uneven split between great domains and crap domains. I’d say that of the 71,065 CO domains for sale, only 10% can be considered great/dominating domains, and the rest, well lets just say that are not good. While searching for a few domains, I came across MANY 2, 3, even 4 worded domains for sale with askig prices in the thousands. This is ridiculous and I doubt any of these domans will ever sell. It always amazes me when I see people’s prices and try to figure out how they came up with that number. All of my domains on sedo are “make offer” which is what most sellers should do.

Remember, your domain is only worth what 2 people are willing to pay – not 1. If you only have 1 person making an offer, then you have no way of comparing your domain’s valu to another offer. However, what if you have multiple offers on a domain – 5, 10, 20 or more? Then how do you assess your domain’s value? Do you look at trends or see what a .com sold for? There is no easy answer.

The list below shows CO domains that have multiple offers on each domain, and still have not sold. I would love to contact each owner and ask them why they have not accepted any offers and what they think the domain is worth.

As you can see from the list, Shaving.co leads with 33 offers which is an incredible amount considering most co domain owners will not ever get an offer – but why does shaving.co have more offers than say gold.co which has 13?

According to google, shaving has over 45 million results and gold has 1.6 million, so does having more results in google guarantee a better chance of selling your domain? NO
Here is a perfect example, jazz.co has 526 MILLION results but only has 13 offers – so simply using google searches is NOT valid.

From the above list, my favorite CO domains are:

xxx.co
email.co
gold.co
news.co

There are also some domains that have offers but I am not too sure why – for example:

daan.co has 8 bids
flug.co has 7
law247.co has 5

So there is no easy answer for selling CO domains, but one thing is for sure, this extension IS here to stay.