Jeff said:
Good points, and one would be wise to fully study and understand all aspects regarding the
highly brandable .TEL prior to investment, IMHO. :gl:
One thing I
can say for sure, however ... regarding both the
highly brandable .TEL as well as the
.WEB extensions ... domainers
will most definitely speculate in both and some will even expect to "make a killing" with the HYPE (as we witnessed, here first-hand, with the pain and implosion of the extremely awkward, lowly "dot Mobey") IMHO.
Both .TEL and .WEB of course are short, one syllable, and three letters ...
Caveat Emptor, as always friends!
Happy Thanksgiving. :santa:
-Jeff
The only real no-brainer is still .com. ALL others are simply running behind. The age of .org and net help those, for sure. But most companies and end users still build and want .com over anything else. Hands down. ALL other extensions carry varying degrees of risk. Some greater than others for domainers.
.tel, from everything I've seen seems to be in the
extremely high risk category for reasons I have already laid out.
For domainers looking at
traditional domaining ways of monetizing (which you and many others seem to fit), .mobi will continue to be construed as a failure. You'd be very fortunate to get renewal fee's off of parking. You'll have to have patience and money to reap rewards on a large scale for companies to come knocking on your door. Mass acceptance and development is really still in it's infancy. I have first hand experience in dealing with larger companies, dealing with link exchanges. It's an extremely slow process to dredge through, but hopefully, it will pay off. I can't imagine how difficult and slow it's been for mTLD in talks of adoption. But I hardly think mobi is dead seeing companies such as
Coke recently starting to embrace it.
For domainers who like to or care to develop, .mobi still has quite a lot of promise. Particularly now, as drops are occurring and prices are falling. If you were to grab a keyword you have interest in and can think of a mobile use for it, it could certainly be turned into gold. Why don't you give it a try Jeff? Just go to
site.mobi, open up a new account and start putting a site together. If you need help along the way, I'd be happy to give you some pointers

. It just might startle you to see that mobile sites have quite a following.
Your main disdain for mobi seems to be it's "brandability", for lack of better terms. You keep harping on the importance of one syllable vs two. Just wondering why you think this is important in branding? Do you think that Google would've done better with Goog? Or maybe "lack" insurance is better tan "Aflack" Insurance? Why would .web be a better investment than .net? Do you really think that companies are going to rush out and re-market their campaigns because there is a new domain extension (again) out there? The bottom line is, people will remember just about anything if it's marketed enough / effectively.
Domainers are the only ones clammering for another shot of .com gold. The ONLY thing that attracted me towards .mobi is the
fact that it's the only tld approved and accredited for mobile sites. It's truly different and needs to be to be effective. Just grab your phone and let me know which on of these sites you'd rather visit to check out a hairstyles:
Site 1
Site 2
Mobile sites need to be different or people simply won't / can't visit them. This difference should be a trustmark and assurance of the extension. DotMobi fits that model, quite nicely.
It's not
needed...but something needs to distinguish between a mobile friendly site vs a site that doesn't work well (or not at all). Just common sense.
Oh, and Happy _\|/_ day to you!