This comment reminds me of NP member ItalianDragon, I told people over a year ago I thought the LLLL.com market would collapse, he called me an idiot many times, then when it did actually happen he blamed me for it. Sometimes people don't seem to like seeing a market for what it is, and that is one that was inflated to silly levels.
Extensions do not collapse because of Jeff, me and some others naysaying. .mobi has fallen over because the degree of usage was nowhere near what was expected by speculators. It was backed by a large % of the biggest Internet co's and big domainers were buying, in the end that counted for nothing at all. The curtain went up and the stage was empty. Even I thought the development levels would be higher than what they have been.
The financial situation has likely made it worse than it otherwise would have been (or maybe sped up the process depending on how you'd like to see it), because people are far more focused on non speculative revenue - ie flipping is dead and that is what .mobi has mainly been about.
I would tend to concur with you, the dotmobi market was always going to grow organically from a standing start. The average end-user can hardly be called a visionary and it is taking time for the use of the internet to migrate away from the desk-top & out into the streets.
It was pretty much a fait accompli that speculators would be the first to run with the extension, as indeed they have done with every other extension ever released (except those with restrictions). The problem occurred when the speculators looked to exit from some of their investments to find that the anticipated growth of the extension via pure Organic growth by end user adoption hadn't materialised.
Those who have most to lose from the success of the extension, (I believe that you refer to them as "naysayers" or someone referred to them as "Jeffs") have mistakenly taken the fall in prices and the number of dropped names as a sign of the failure or indeed "death" of dotmobi when I suggest to you that this was another utterly predictable event; that speculation versus bad timing = sell-off (be it oil, coal, ork bellies, corn or domain names).
Speculators will buy and sell for a number of reasons; when selling for profit it is quite self explanatory why they have done so. When they sell at a loss it is less so.. Usually they have 2 choices; sell and move on through choice or sell and move on because they have no choice.
The speculative investment in domains is like taking out a bet on the markets, you take a 28day position and and the end of that period you can cash-in or roll a losing bet over for another 28days or exit (walk away).
Because rolling the position in domaining terms requires further investment via renewal fees the choice is often made for the speculator because they have overstretched themselves and cannot afford to renew again. There was a 2 year window for a profit after sunrise and the timing didn't come together for them. It really is that simple.
Obviously the wider market conditions have compounded this a great deal, many domains have been dropped against the will of the cash-strapped owners but others have simply lost patience because the mobile internet is trundling along at a pace they cannot cope with.
On the flip side, many domainers and professional investors (including some of the dotcom guru's who wouldn't like it to be known to the broader community) have been picking up superb domains at reg fee after the big drop a few months ago.
Some serious portfolios have been put together in recent months, in the same way that some shrewd domainers picked up dotcoms in 2000-2001.
Since then the LLL.mobi have been bought out (again) and registrations are on the rise (again). There is little point in declaring that dotmobi is dead on the evidence we have available.
The success of dotmobi is about taking a market share of what will be billions of web-users. When you have numbers that big, a viable market share doesn't need to be all that big... but I certainly believe that it will be significant.
Most domainers who dabble with dotmobi will probably lose money; afterall, most domainers who buy domains in every other extension will lose money... they are like lottery tickets, when you take a 100 similarly average domain names, maybe 5 will sell for a nice profit... maybe one will buy the seller a new car..
Maybe one sale in a 1,000 will help to put the kids through school & one in a million (or more) will actually sell for $1 million or more... The odds are against the domainer, it's a hobby for most.. lets be honest.. if you own 100,000 domains your odds are improved (if you have quality names) but look at the overhead of managing 100,000 names & renewals etc.. Parking revenues follow the same kind of statistics... very few earn a 'real living wage'
So, I don't think you (snoop) bought down the LLLL.com market nor did Jeff cause the collapse in dotmobi values between 2007 & 2009... it was all part of the natural cycles and of course that's what we are looking at now... the market for dotmobi is going to improve as the number of made for mobile sites increases; I don't think you'll see much of that in the US or Western Europe - not for a while at least. The action will be in India, China & Africa - where desk-top internet will be espoused by small screen mobile access...
What happens in the US & Western Europe will probably follow that pattern, maybe a year or two behind the developing world. Who can blame a speculator for dropping names that might demand another 2 or 3 years of renewals?
Of course, as with real-estate, one sellers misery is another buyers fortune..
