Taco Bell is promoting ta.co domain name.
The .co domain name extension continues to rack up big name customers, the latest being Taco Bell.
The fast food restaurant chain is now promoting ta.co and an upgrade to its website. Now you can order completely customized tacos and other menu items through your mobile phone.
Taco Bell bought the domain name directly from the .co registry.
For now, typing in ta.co merely forwards you to Taco Bell. When I watch Taco Bell’s introductory video (below), it seems that its main point of using ta.co is to create a very short URL for typing in on your mobile phone.
As the web continues to move to mobile, having a short domain name is more important than ever.
Where domain hacks are concerned, can anybody think of any usage by an established brand with a higher profile? I’m drawing a blank.
It depends if you call abc.xyz a domain hack for Alphabet/Google
Personally I use “domain hack” to refer to
(A) Domains where the dot appears mid-word –e.g. Ta.co, Chocolat.es, Cheque.red, Aladd.in –
or to
(B) cases of a ccTLD not normally read as a word being used as a word – Where.To, Mixt.In, Vote.No, etc.
So they think their weed smoking teenage demographic is going to remember to type in Ta.co? LOL Marketing Fail! They’re going to ask their friends, “why did they put a dot in the middle of TACO?”
I disagree on this one. People can type in tacobell.com, but if you remember the shortcut, you just have to type in 5 characters including the dot. Pretty simple.
I could see some still typing in taco.com from that, so if they wanted to use ta.co, I think they should also buy taco.com.
If they go to Taco.com, they’ll be very disappointed.
Hey TacoBell.com why not get Taco.com?
I give props to Taco Bell for taking the unique creative approach with Ta.Co not only is it sure and catchy but it will make people aware of the .Co. With any of the other extensions besides .Coms my thought process has always been the same, they must be clever, catchy and short.
Otherwise it just would not work. Even though Taco.com is a powerful name to have Ta.Co just seems more creative and easy to remember as well.
– Will
Shorter is better, that’s why Facebook paid $8.5M for FB.com .
Let’s face facts, Taco.com will be receiving a boat load of traffic throughout ta.co’s high cost promotion.
Marketing Fail. Incredibly stupid move. What part of O.Co’s 61% traffic loss did they not understand?
I am not so sure that this is the best move. Visually as written, its quite memorable BUT one of the reasons a domain name is easy to remember (or not) is because it is easy to pronounce at recall.
So how will this work for Ta.co?
Well first phonetically it could be TAH dot COH —thats not exactly “Taco” or it could be stated, “Tee, A dot Co” – again not reflective of “taco”.
In print materials, this is great, but in the spoken word, it fails badly. That all being said, good for the folks at .Co for getting this on board and props to Taco Bell for being adventurous.