.mobi Are we being "Suckered" with .Mobi

[binaryman]

See this article and some of the responses. Is it a hoot? or what? What worries me though is that I see nothing being done to back up .mobi with a massive marketing and education campaign to make the general public aware of its existence. Even the salesman at my local Vodaphone outlet had never heard of .Mobi yet when I asked him about it today.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060928/070426.shtml

 

[MinionDH]

According to this article and the responses to it we should,nt be too euphoric.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060928/070426.shtml

The guys at TechDirt bash everything.. just read any of their other articles. Carlo has been bashing .Mobi for months now and it's now at the point of annoying. He makes the same ridiculous claims over and over again..

 

[ezinaz]

.MOBI by Joe Fox on Oct 10th, 2006 @ 10:26am
.MOBI is for content producers. this qualifies the number of .MOBI registrations. Internet 2.0 is represented by the consumer by "Self-Publishing". Many expert project it eventually as the #2 after .COM, although there are some who think .INFO will end up #2, as it is understood by 30 languages worldwide. Good names in any TLD have an intrinsic "type-in" traffic worth. I have seen even misspelling in .COM that are going for serious bucks. By the way we are up to 55,000,000 registrations.

The bolded part is what I'm interested in. Could that be true, 55 million regs?

Never mind...here is the estimate from "the dot Mobi people"...

The dotMobi people anticipate up to 90,000 names to be registered during the initial land rush, with several hundred thousand registrations by year end, as the price of the mobile domains falls close to the pricing for web-based dot-com domains.

Link

 

[AGS]

I personally don't think it'll take off, trying to use a mobile to access the net is a tedious thing to do. The problem being that the screen is way too small.

I have one of the latest phones and I never use the WAP feature because it's a pain in the arse.

 

[gamehouse]

.mobi's future, only time can tell.

Arguing that the price is kept high to keep speculartors away from registering names is dumb. BS is the arguement that so many names were registered mostly by content providers. I love to believe that but we all know the truth.

There was good news from DN Journal about the recent pool auctions. But try to look it again. First of all, the names sold fall into two categories.

A) The name itself (without the ext) has lot of value either OVT or PPC or otherwise
B) The names with .mobi highly related to .mobi in the sense they may be accessed on the go (If ever they get developed, of course)

Now, any generic with high OVT or PPC in any obscure extension will be sold at high price especially if they are auctioned off. And naturally the names that fit the extension are also valuable along with possible high PPC value.

So lets wait for pool auctions over and then see how many .mobi sales will be reported in DN Journal.

For one thing, its ridiculous that the registry holds back few thousand names and auctions off for profit. Another registry that does this is .tv corp but they do not auction off. But they are worse too to be so greedy.

I would love to see .mobi in circulation and in use few months from now. Now everything is still in heat.

Also, when the mTLD registry auctions off those so called premium names, I really really wonder how many of them will be developed as mTLD hopes.

Since most of the names are paid for 2 years registration, the drama starts around this time in 2008 when its renewal time since I am pretty sure that it takes more than 2 years for data access rates to come down as well as speeds to go up.

My 2 cents,

GH

 

[hawkeye]

See this article and some of the responses. Is it a hoot? or what? What worries me though is that I see nothing being done to back up .mobi with a massive marketing and education campaign to make the general public aware of its existence. Even the salesman at my local Vodaphone outlet had never heard of .Mobi yet when I asked him about it today.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060928/070426.shtml

I say - 'give it some time!' Just because the .mobi extension is now available, and all the domain speculators have spent themselves to the edge of bankruptcy, doesn't mean there's supposed to be a massive marketing campaign the next day to educate the world to using the extension now. Landrush isn't even 3 weeks old yet. There has to be a curb time for those that will promote it to get their plans, sites, budgets, strategies going etc. Then there are the phone, pda, etc. makers, that have to get their products going and marketed. Not everyone has the latest and greatest tech devices in hand, waiting to jump into the next fad etc.

I'd say to those domainers that spent their rent money, and are looking for quick returns - "yikes!" If they can't wait out the two year reg time, bottle and can collecting might be a better course to pursue. There will be some time to pass before any of these names start bringing any real roi, other than speculator buys and prices!

imo

 

[MCDomains]

It's too early to know if we're being suckered.

If .mobi doesn't become the standard for mobile domains ... then yes, we were suckered.

 

[fonzie_007]

There were some awfully nice .mobi sales as posted at DNJ this past week. I remain skeptical about the extension, but am curious who is forking out $x,xxx/domain.

 

[Traveler]

I think it would be a waste for the big guys to spend advertising dollars on this extension right now. The "premium names" have yet to be auctioned off. It is going to take awhile for everyone to really start developing their .mobis. Could you imagine trying to "educate" someone about the .mobi and they go looking for the sites and only find parked pages? A big advertising campaign tomorrow would probably hurt the extension more than help it. Six months from now that will hopefully be a different story.

 

[Jo]

I don't think we are being suckered...I would like to see developed sites. So bash me if you want but I agree with putting a high dollar amount on the premium names. There's many names I could have regged, good ones that are now gone but I chose the ones that I could develope. What the heck was I going to do with stockticker or stopwatch (both names I was going to reg and then changed my mind.) I don't have the knowledge to develope those and you can bet whoever regged them is going to park and just try to sell which is a damn shame. Those and many many others have such GREAT potential. Just like the premium names (yes I know not all the words they chose are considered premium in OUR eyes) It would be a sad thing if only speculators grabbed up the premiums...they were parked and then .mobi would fail no matter how much you tried to promote it.

 

[shopperx]

Hello guys,

The .tv generated the same excitement that .mobi is generating right now. I was reading your comments and the DNJ sales, i was gonna reg a few mobis but today i decided to give it a few more days to study the numbers. The registration process was huge, here are some statistics:

* There are less than 8000 LLL.mobi left
* There are less than 9000 NNNN.mobi left
* There are no NNN.mobi left.
* The posted .mobi sales sums around 110K.
* The estimated registrations are 90,000 x 30$ each = 2.7 Million Dollars

I will keep you posted with more specific details as soon as i get them.

I think premium keywords are always a good investment in all extension, and the domain length is not a problem in mobiles because of the prediction dictionary included with most cellphones. If i see the big .com and .net players regging mobis i will surely jump on the rush too.

Regards

 

[sf2010]

We all tend to experience buyer's remorse so I think questioning the wisdom of purchasing new TLD domain names is normal. As with anything else, there are (and always will be) naysayers to anything new.

From my personal experience (I use my PDA majority of any given day), I really think .mobi has a unique opportunity provide some excellent "on-the-go" services that other domain names are not providing. I think the best thing you can do to help make sure that dotMobi is successful is to provide some useful content.

If you've accumulated 100's of domain names and are financially exposed, perhaps you can review what you have and sell some. Remember what they say in the stock market, bulls make money, bears make money and pigs get slaughtered!

cheers,

kev

 

[DomainBuyerBroker]

The skepticism is healthy. It keeps buyers on the sidelines so they can bring money to the table later on.

Remember dot mobi has only been available for public registration for about three weeks. Dot com was out for three years before many people even cared and then that way like 1997. How's .com doing ten years later? Pretty good yes?

Give .mobi a chance.

On a side note, I spent just less than $2000 on .mobi. I sold vehicles.mobi today for $435 right here on namepros. Hysteria or entrepreneurial vision?

I don't feel suckered. I'm looking forward to more sale AND development. That's the other aspect here. I get the sense that many .mobi owners want to develop and that is healthy too.

How many .eu domains are or have been developed? Now that's a sucker extension.

 

[shopperx]

I wanted to make one correction:

* The estimated registrations are 90,000 - 5.615 "Reserved" domains = 84.385 Public Registrations x 30$ each = 2.5 Million Dollars (Profit so far)

Once the "Reserved" domains are auctioned the profits will be extremely big.

I also checked Sedo and Afternic looking for the "promised" bids but i say im not impressed at all. I hope im wrong and it becomes a success.

I will keep checking numbers...

Regards

 

[labrocca]

There needs to be time for all the names to be developed before .mobi names can be promoted. I estimate 2 years before people notice or care about the .mobi name. Only time will tell if the extension will succeed. In any market there will be those that are speculators and those that are suckers. The key is value and research.

 

[MinionDH]

Remember what they say in the stock market, bulls make money, bears make money and pigs get slaughtered!

Booya! Great tip Mr. Cramer

 

[oldtimer]

Many domainers complain that they weren’t there at the time that good .com names were available in the early 90’s, well here they are on the verge of the land rush for a whole new extension and many are missing a once in a life time opportunity again , unlike today there were no overture or high bids or keyword data or any proven track records available back in the early 90’s, but those who were smart took calculated risks and depended on their own best judgment and made wise choices that paid off beyond anyone’s expectations. The key factor here is the reward to risk ratio, if you invest in 10 domains with good keywords you might have to spend 3 to 6 hundred dollars on registration, but if the extension picks up and becomes the default for all mobile devices and is given priority on search engines then each one of your names might be worth several thousand dollars as developed websites. At the worst you might loose a few hundred dollars but at the best you might gain several thousands, this kind of ratio is only possible at the beginning stages of the land rush when moderately good names are still available, once the extension is established you won’t be able to join in for just a few hundred dollars and this huge reward to risk ratios will no longer be available. Even if you looked at this as a coin toss with 50/50 chances, at odds of 100x to 1000x reward on every sixty dollars it seems to be a no brainer assuming that you can get premium or semi premium domains at register fee. But the key factor here is not to get carried away, invest wisely and try not to get junk domains because you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself.

On a side note I think that the premium .mobi domains should not be auctioned off, instead they should be made into portals and directories that would list all mobi compatible sites for the category related to each premium domain. For example travel .mobi should list all the .mobi compatible travel sites.

 

[Traveler]

Maybe it is just me, and I know I have said this before. Microsoft was one of the APPLICANTS for the .mobi extension. Why would they put their name on something they don't have a serious interest in? It certainly is not for the reg fee money as that amounts to nothing for a corporation like microsoft.

Microsoft knows where the future is and they wanted the .mobi

Notice the two mobile ads that have been posted both have the "Windows Mobile" logo on them.

Will .mobi be the next "big thing"? I don't know, but the mobile internet should be huge and the money behind this extension obviously sees this as the fastest path to make the mobile internet a reality for the average person.

This is the safest "bet" I have seen in a very long time.

 

[whitebark]

He makes the same ridiculous claims over and over again..

Sort of sounds like all those .mobi lovers hyping up this lousy extension. On and on it goes - mobi this and mobi that.

.mobi = the newest .name .biz etc.

 

[gamehouse]

Very true. I, myself, getting into discussions and more discussions about .mobi. Not much useful to my pocket, now I am off to buy my own .mobi names

One last thing though. It seems in his interview, Neil (I think thats his name) points out that .mobi is the leading step for a new world of mobile internet. How true is that?. The leading factors are technology and rates and speed, imho. Once the technology is there and other factors kick in, why the heck it matters if the right site has a .mobi extension or .oops extension.

That all said, I am completely out of .mobi discussions and wish everyone with a .mobi a great success. Sooner or later the success will come.

GH

Sort of sounds like all those .mobi lovers hyping up this lousy extension. On and on it goes - mobi this and mobi that.

.mobi = the newest .name .biz etc.