Breaking: GoDaddy Acquires Premium .co Portfolio From .co Registry

This morning I made a discovery and noticed the domain name 2.co was listed for sale on GoDaddy’s NameFind website. After doing some more research, I noticed a large amount of premium .co domain names were listed on GoDaddy’s NameFind site on January 4, 2017.

After further research, I am confident that GoDaddy has acquired the premium domains held by the .co registry (likely ALL of the remaining ones they held). GoDaddy was not very “open” with these domains as all that I checked are under whois privacy protection.

Update: GoDaddy’s Paul Nicks confirms my research and provided the following statement:

I can confirm that GoDaddy acquired another portfolio of short, memorable domains that will fit perfectly with our mission of increasing the liquidity of the aftermarket by pricing domains and distributing them via AfternicDLS to our registrar partners. This particular portfolio has the added benefit of being made up of .CO domains which we believe have proven themselves over the years as an excellent TLD for startups and small businesses.

The domain names include a large amount of single letter and single number .co domains. Also premium keyword, one word .co domains and many IDN domain names.

Here is a running list of domains I found manually, so I am not sure on the exact amount that are now NameFind domains.

1. 2.co
2. B.co
3. Dis.co
4. Catch.co
5. F.co
6. R.co
7. S.co
8. U.co
9. V.co
10. W.co
11. 5.co
12. 6.co
13. 7.co
14. 9.co
15. C.co
16. D.co
17. H.co
18. I.co
19. J.co
20. L.co
21. M.co
22. N.co
23. P.co
24. 1.co
25. 2.co
26. 3.co
27. 4.co
28. ZZZ.co
29. YD.co
30. YeastInfection.co
31. YG.co
32. YM.com
33. Your.co
34. YP.co
35. YRB.co
36. YS.co
37. YV.co
38. YY.co
39. ZC.co
40. Zen.co
41. ZI.co
42. ZL.co
43. ZO.co
44. Zombie.co
45. ZR.co
46. Zuma.co
47. ZX.co
48. XT.co
49. XW.co
50. XB.co
51. XK.co
52. Bunch of IDN .co domains

HUNDREDS more (maybe and likely thousands more)

The portfolio consists of single letter and single number .co’s. 2 letter, 2 character and 2 number. Premium one word and two word, as well as a bunch of IDN’s. It is likely thousands of domains.

I have reached out to both GoDaddy and the .co registry for comment, but have not heard back from either at time of posting. To note, both people I contacted were at NamesCon, so they may be traveling.

This would be GoDaddy’s 6th domain name portfolio purchase, which all started in April 2015 with the Marchex portfolio ($28M for 200K domains), Worldwide Media December 2015 ($35.5M for about 70K domains), DomainSource December 2015 (small purchase around 1,000 domains, purchase price unknown) and Elite Domains when DotWeekly broke the story + later breakdown in April 2016 ($42M for over 100K domains), Traffic Names LTD in December 2016 which included around 30,000 domain names (unknown sales price currently) and now .co Premium Held Domains from the .co registry.

Interestingly, DotWeekly has broke the news on 4 of the 6 GoDaddy/NameFind domain name portfolio purchases, without any insider information from any sources. (pat on the back)

.co is not heavily connected in most of the research tools that I use, so that is the reason it has taken me some 23 days to discover this.

I will update this breaking news story when I get more details but this is a significant number of premium .co domain names that now are all listed on GoDaddy’s NameFind website, which ONLY contain domain names owned by GoDaddy and the NameFind subsidiary.

GoDaddy has the LL .co’s listed with a minimum offer amount of $48,749.00. Many of the one word domains have $xx,xxx minimum offer amounts, the CC .co’s $7,799.00, NN .com’s with minimum offer of $32,499.00 etc. to note.