.mobi Mobi bashers and Naysayers

Mobi Cheap said:

cac14850, finally something to disagree with you on - I knew that day will come!

I do realize you are in a better position to know, but the one you quoted cannot possibly be "the worst argument (you) have heard against mobi."

As anti-mobi arguments go I would say it's somewhere in the second quartile.
:imho:

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Nope worst argument ever, here is why. WHile I agree that if the argument had been mobi is awkward and to hard to rememeber, to many characters to type on a cell phone etc.. it would only be in the bottom half of arguments. However, the use of .tv, .us and .co.uk to highlight the point pushes it beyond a merely bad argument to an utterly terrible argument.

cac14850 said:

... beyond a merely bad argument to an utterly terrible argument.

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Yeah, my point stands - if it's just an "utterly terrible argument" then its nowhere near the worst examples.
:imho:

snoop said:

We are almost down to .info style prices in my view.

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from where i stand, even at .info price levels - that is still good enough for me... espesially 1 year after launch.

these $60 nuggets i picked up in landrush are already comparable to .info levels... man, that is friggin music to my ears.

personally, i would be happy with 1/4 of .info levels.... my expectations have been far exceeded and thats all that matters.

mjnels said:

from where i stand, even at .info price levels - that is still good enough for me... espesially 1 year after launch.

these $60 nuggets i picked up in landrush are already comparable to .info levels... man, that is friggin music to my ears.

personally, i would be happy with 1/4 of .info levels.... my expectations have been far exceeded and thats all that matters.

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thats the whole thing...investing in .mobi at landrush was a good idea when you were guaranteed to make a profit on decent names. Investing in it now? I don't quite think so...its too unstable. Perhaps thats why .mobi regs have slowed down to a halt

sashas said:

thats the whole thing...investing in .mobi at landrush was a good idea when you were guaranteed to make a profit on decent names. Investing in it now? I don't quite think so...its too unstable. Perhaps thats why .mobi regs have slowed down to a halt

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most of the names have been held back or regged by speculators, investors, domainers,developers and companies too obviously.
the masses dont know a deal about mobi....yet.
now, almost every regsitrar you visit has mobi on front page, its on sedo search, its springing up with companies on their com pages etc
Now is the beginning, not the end.
Naturally most of the early domainers to this extension are done regging. Now many of us are investing in the super premiums. So not $60 a pop, or $10 a pop. But xxxx or xx,xxx a pop, such is the interest and belief.
We are also invested in time and money into developing which is the future and where the REAL money is. Not flipping.

Registrations will take a steadier slope now, that is natural, not unnatural.

Depends what you see i guess, the glass half full or half empty, depending on your viewpoint.

The naysayers are making the classic mistake thinking that 'time stands still'
They argue from the basic assumption that every business, organisation, individual has (of todays date) already got a web site, their perfect domain name, captured their niche etc...

Wake up guys!!

For those who have their perfect, branded, well used, profitable .com (etc.) I agree that they will want to use the strengths of that to capture mobile traffic using diverts & mobile.xxx.com etc...

BUT!

Minor oversight on the part of the naysayers is that;

The mobile web is barely out of the womb... let alone in nappies..

The entire Web as we know it today is still way way less developed than it will be in another 5 years (etc) there are still (globally speaking) more than half of all businesses (of all sizes) without an effective internet presence.

There are 1,000's of new company start-ups every week (globally) each & every one competing for domain names, marketing strategies etc..

The latest trends are to use multiple ID's to market & brand companies...

For a 'made up' example take the sizzling bacon company;

It has 'sizzlingbacon.com (& defensively reg'd other extensions)
It may well have had the foresight to catch... bacon.com breakfast.com baconbuttie.com porkproducts.com sizzlingdeals.mobi sizzle.mobi grill.mobi & other marketing targetted .mobis to promote it's brands, new products etc...

By the end of the decade you will see multiple niches being targetted by each company... this will create huge demand for the right names!

Now, lets look at how many bacon producers there are on the planet; 10's of thousands!
How many packagers & branded end user products.... 10's of thousands

How many 'perfect' niche domains are there.... at a stretch of the imagination.... every one of the companies may get to reg their name (assuming that all trade with a different name which is very unlikely - in factmost companies have at least one 'twin' somewhere on the planet)....

Then you have your marketing & branding domains! These will be in very short supply..... I mean just how many different ways can you think of selling bacon!!?

.mobi will be huge in marketing & targetted mobile niches... networking, dating, weather, financial, news, sports, food, retail, books, personal, email, in fact in most areas where we use the web most already...
research will be an area dominated by large screen PC's as will graphic work, video work etc..

Truth is, no-one knows what will happen next but I'm confident that marketing & promotion uses will dominate the b2b & b2c markets via .mobi & that the social aspects will also prosper.

The naysayers are assuming too much by not thinking outside the box, they forget that the world never stops, they forget that every day there are less choices of domains available (thats just a statistical fact) & I don't know how many .mobi's are regged but there are still an awful lot of good ones left! - I think many have regged dud names.... I know I have... it's a basic law of averages & in order to succeed one must fail.

The naysayers are great because they keep giving us hurdles to overcome... the points they raise have helped me refine my searches for new reg's, they have given me ideas for how the web may be used in the future & of course they will probably be right in some areas that they make their arguments.... my own portfolio is weighted so that in order for say 30% of them to succeed, another 30% may well fail - spread your exposure to .mobi & I believe you will do well out of it...

All IMHO of course & respect to the naysayers.... all arguments are valid until proven otherwise.

Regards

Gary.

sashas said:

thats the whole thing...investing in .mobi at landrush was a good idea when you were guaranteed to make a profit on decent names. Investing in it now? I don't quite think so...its too unstable. Perhaps thats why .mobi regs have slowed down to a halt

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yes, it is a LOT harder regging .mobi's now looking for a quick flip.... but remember, the general consensus back at landrush when i was buying prime words at regfee was that THOSE were a complete waste and not even worth $60.

just 1 year later, and look how even the naysayers attitude has changed..


First they ignore you....
Then they laugh at you.....
Then they fight you...........
Then..............................................................

snoop said:

I have a chuckle when people bag one extension yet suggest others just as bad (or worse) like .us or .tv are somehow a better investment.

Regarding valuations .mobi prices have fallen greatly since the flowers.mobi/fun.mobi sales, I'm not sure they are really particularly overpriced now compared to other speculative extensions. We are almost down to .info style prices in my view.

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I didn't realize that the trendline for .mobi resales was heading down. If thats true then I'm not at all surprised. How many people would have bought into .mobi had Rick Schwartz not bid 200k for flowers? Was there really ever any other good reason to do so before that? It doesn't seem that until then the space started bubbling. Was he betting on belief in the space or on some likelyhood of a specific corporate interest?

If the trend is heading down while most every other TLD is heading up then what does that really say? I predict that someday the .mobi rollout will make a nice textbook study in market bubbles and crowd mania. Please accept my apologies in advance if anyone feels personally offended by this opinion.

cac14850 said:

Now this is the worst argument I have heard against mobi. Yes still risky, yes it may not go anywhere blah blah.. But lets look at the examples you just gave. What does .tv stand for in the internet context? how is .co.uk any less awkward than mobi? .us? are we talking about social sites? I would bet a fair amount of money you stick those 4 extenstions next to each other and ask random people which stands for which .mobi will do no worse than 2nd.

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My argument was from a linguistic perspective, not a motor-mechanical one.

.CO.UK isn't awkward at all to the millions who use it regularly. Slightly cumbersome maybe but not awkward. And again everyone who sees it gets that this is something to do with the UK, same as .us.

.TV stands for "Television" in any context you want to imagine. I'm not sure if you were trying to argue otherwise but if you think that hordes of casual internet users look at it and see "Tuvalu" you are out of your everlovin mind, Not one in a thousand have ever even heard of the tiny island nation. When people see .tv they think "Video on the net. Cool.").

.MOBI could catch on but its going to take a huge investment in PR and advertising to make it happen and possibly infrastructural changes (like a .mobi button on the handset) to really drive it home. People just have to be led to realize how much FUN it is to say "mobi" and they'll get it. Now perhaps the registry is willing to pony up the few millions (a drop in the bucket of what its going to take) it's made selling reg and premium names to help jumpstart this effort but I havn't seen any indication of that sort of willingness yet.

However I do see .co.uk's, .us's and .tv's advertised everyday with no explanations necessary.

finster said:

I didn't realize that the trendline for .mobi resales was heading down.

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Trend lines....?


You could equally say that, because, Sex.com sold in 2006 for $14m....And, then, the highest .com sale in 2007 was only Porn.com at $9.5m....And then, later in 2007, Computer.com sold at only $2.1m....

...then, the TREND in .com is DOWN....so, CAUTION, CAUTION...the sky's falling in on .com...!!


Lets be a bit careful here....Its perfectly normal - in any business category - for there to be headline sales, and then lesser solid sales, in any given timeframe....Domains ain't any different.

.

mjnels said:

from where i stand, even at .info price levels - that is still good enough for me... espesially 1 year after launch.

these $60 nuggets i picked up in landrush are already comparable to .info levels... man, that is friggin music to my ears.

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You have my sincere congratulations on that. I wish I'd picked up a bunch of .mobi too. I never anticipated the bubble. But then again I've never played the domain game for the quick flip. Out of a couple hundred LR2 .info's I've sold maybe a dozen and some of those were horsetrades.

I'm not a mobi-hater. I'm all for any new TLD. Why not? I'm just callin' out the bubble for what it is.

DomainTalker said:

Trend lines....?


You could equally say that, because, Sex.com sold in 2006 for $14m....And, then, the highest .com sale in 2007 was only Porn.com at $9.5m....And then, later in 2007, Computer.com sold at only $2.1m....

...then, the TREND in .com is DOWN....so, CAUTION, CAUTION...the sky's falling in on .com...!!


Lets be a bit careful here....Its perfectly normal - in any business category - for there to be headline sales, and then lesser solid sales, in any given timeframe....Domains ain't any different.

.

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One needs to look at the quality of what is selling. Sex.com is a far more valuable domain than porn.com and porn.com is a far more valuable domain than computer.com. It isn't like the .mobi world where flowers.mobi got 200k to be followed by far better names like poker.mobi and realestate.mobi selling for much less! That is what I mean by trending down. There was a huge upswing from the flowers.mobi auction, the ended with the second .mobi traffic auction where prices were nothing like what was achieved the first time. Then we have other categories such as 3 letter .mobi which are currently in a down trend,

From 3character.com,

"3-Letter .mobi - $165 (- $35 since October 1, 2007 report)"

In the first few months of its life .mobi did extremely well, very big gains, in the last 12 months it had hugely underperformed the rest of the market. I think this is mainly due to the situation with the backers not doing very much which has resulted in deflating expectations.