As one would expect, there are many people who are buying .CO domain names with the hopes of capitalizing on typo traffic. These people are looking through Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and other various traffic estimation tools in the hopes of purchasing .CO domain names that will get traffic intended for the .COM.

One thing people need to be cognizant of (aside from trademark issues which I am not going to discuss) is that many high traffic websites get significant search engine traffic, and there isn’t going to be leakage from that. If someone visits a website via search engine or other referral, there will be no leakage to the .CO unless the referrer makes the typo.

Yesterday evening, I was asked if I had an interest in Burbank.CO. A reader of my blog offered his position in the auction because I didn’t back order it, and I wasn’t interested. I’ve been very fortunate with SEO and referral traffic for that site, and at the present time, only about 14% of the traffic is from type-in.  Assuming 20,000 visitors per month total, that means under 3,000 are typing it in to their browser.  If .3% of this traffic typos it, that’s about 9 visitors a month that I am losing.  It just doesn’t make that much sense to pay more than $500, which is where this name ended I believe.

There are a number of .CO websites that are live, where the .COM website is also live. Sex.com/Sex.co, Porn.com/Porn.co, Porno.com/Porno.co, Hotels.com/Hotels.co, and Weather.com/Weather.co are five such comparisons you can do, as I would imagine these sites rely on significant type-in traffic, which is where the leakage would take place. Since I don’t know how long each .CO has been live, I can’t say whether it’s 100% accurate, but here are the Compete numbers and % of traffic:

• Sex.com – 135,793 | Sex.co – 393 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .23%
• Porn.com – 1,807,569 | Porn.co – 1,015 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .056%
• Porno.com – 233,909 | Porno.co – 656 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .28%
• Hotels.com – 4,822,172 | Hotels.co – 1,698 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .035%
• Weather.com – 31,992,990 | Weather.co – 29,893 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .093%

As you can see, there isn’t much leakage to the .CO, so investing a lot of money with the intent only to capitalize on typo traffic isn’t smart. Of course .CO domain owners can (and many will) develop their .CO domain names like I am doing, however, relying on revenue from typo traffic here might not be a smart play.

I just received a note from Oversee.net announcing that the keynote speaker for the one day DomainFest conference in New York City on August 18th will be David Mason, an AOL Senior Vice President. David Mason works with the AOL Content Platform, and he joined the company when AOL acquired StudioNow, which he co-founded in 2007 and developed into the world’s largest web-based video creation platform. In addition, Mason started the company that turned into Buy.com. You can read Mason’s Linkedin profile for more information.

There are going to be somewhere around 150 people (give or take) at the conference next month, which will be held at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan. The event is scheduled to run from 10:30am to 10:30pm.

To register for the event, visit DomainFest.com, where you can also see the full agenda and list of speakers and sessions. The cost of registration is just $175, and it includes a full lunch and a dinner networking party. If you live in the New York City area, you should consider attending this conference.