Google has acquired the domain name g.co that will only link to official Google products and services. The domain name acquisition in itself is not much news, but it is further evidence that premium domain names are very important in a company’s branding. “The shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember,” writes Gary Briggs, Google VP of Consumer Marketing . “The downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to. We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.” It is likely Google paid well into seven figures for the domain name with Domain Incite reporting that they believe the starting price for single character domains believed to be $1.5 million. Other high profile .CO acquisitions include Overstock paying $350,000 for o.co, which it uses to rebrand the company internationally, while Amazon bought a.co, z.co, k.co and cloud.co. Additionally, Twitter acquired t.co for its URL shortening service. Google will continue to use goo.gl as their public URL shortener that anyone will still be able to shorten URLs across the web. The acquisition is also a coup for the .CO ccTLD and will help boost awareness of .CO that now has over one million registrations in less than a year.
