Top tech companies are bidding over .co domains, which are offered up by Colombia. Overstock bought O.co, and Twitter bought T.co for it’s new official link shortening service. Google has joined the ranks of .co domain owners today by purchasing G.co for an undisclosed amount. According to the placeholder at g.co, Google will be using the short domain as an official link shortening service for its suite of products. Google wants it’s users to be able to trust any g.co link they see, and said that it will always lead to a Google product.
Google also points out that it has a public link shortening service, goo.gl, that people can use to make their own short links. Links using goo.gl can be used to shorten links from across the web, and aren’t just used for Google products.
In only a year of public selling of domain names, the .co registry is already a very popular destination. The .co domain was created for use by the country Colombia, but anyone is able to buy a .co domain through public registries such as Godaddy.com. In an interview with Reuters, Juan Diego Calle, the chief executive of the .co domain registry, shared some pretty impressive information about recent .co domain purchases. The highly popular single letter domains (which are not publicly available) are said to now run upwards of 1.5 million dollars per domain. Overstock was able to buy the o.co domain for a wallet-friendly $350,000, and with prices sky rocketing we can only assume Google paid a pretty penny for the domain. With Google remaining some of their popular products to slightly more Google centric names the G.co purchase makes perfect sense.