.mobi Why Mobi didn't have a chance...

[freeflow]

......in the past, but might in the future.

First there was a native app boom now it is time for web apps and last but not least the time will come for mobile websites. Your average business and developer doesn’t need any kind of app to have a mobile presence. When this time comes people will realize that there are many great .mobi names to register or to buy for a fraction of the price of other tlds. The best part is that .mobi is the only tld that says “I am mobile”. We all know that technically the tld doesn’t matter, but from a marketing perspective I think .mobi has a big advantage and I just can’t stop saying it, but .mobi just looks cooler than all the other strange possibilities like m + dot, wap + whatever, slash + something awkward etc. I know it has been a long and hard road for .mobi domainers, but I still believe .mobi will have its chance in the future...

Read this and keep dotmobi in mind:
When Responsive Web Design Is Bad For SEO

In my January column I resolved not to discuss the responsive Web design issue anymore, as the One URL versus multiple URL issue is moot now that Google has announced a way to consolidate link equity for equivalent mobile URLs. Unfortunately, the rest of the SEO community isn’t following suit, as responsive Web design still seems to have the undeserved reputation for being the best option for SEO.

http://searchengineland.com/when-responsive-web-design-is-bad-for-seo-149109

 

[Kate]

The issue at hand goes well beyond .mobi.

For non-domainers .mobi is nothing special, just another extension.
There are too many extensions already.

Imagine that, if I allowed the registries to dictate my Internet strategy I should operate a distinct mobile-friendly website on a .mobi, then use a .jobs for the recruitment section, and publish my contact data on .tel. When you look at the big picture (not just one specific extension) you see the absurdity.

Businesses don't see value in fragmentation of their online presence. Just unnecessary confusion.

The only thing that makes .mobi special (to domainers) is how it was heavily hyped - quite surprising given that the TLD is awkward and not very sexy (IMO). It was even depicted as the dotcom killer. I know that some people have lost 6 figures on .mobi and are still feeling the pain. In other extensions there are isolated cases too, but I have not witnessed losses on the scale of .mobi.

Some domainers were very vocal in support of .mobi because of their sizable investments, and the failure of .mobi fostered bitter disappointment.
On the other hand I don't see much crying out loud and nostalgia over .asia .tel .me .xxx or even .co

What is funny in this business is that 'new' extensions are now released at a rapid pace, like one every year or so. So memories of the previous landrush are still fresh, domainers are more cautious because they haven't had enough time to forget the lessons of the past :bingo:

 

[Kate]

There is nothing special with .mobi, it failed along other TLDs for one simple reason: there is no need for another TLD, and also we don't need more fragmentation of the WWW.

Since .mobi was buried (that is roughly 5 years ago), mobile Internet has soared, the tablets in particular are very popular today.
But all those technology advances have done nothing to bring some relevance back to .mobi.

In fact, the distinction between desktop and mobile has blurred further.
The concept was inherently flawed.

 

[jmcc]

You've also got to bear in mind the economic conditions when .mobi launched. There was an artificial shortage of good .com domain names due to domain tasting and .eu had also been launched and plundered. In registration terms, .mobi is doing well for a niche TLD. The real casualty of the credit crunch in the domain business was .asia sTLD which launched just as things imploded. It has taken a few years just to get to about 470K domains. Many of the .mobi registrations, initially, were brand protection registrations. However despite mTLD (the .mobi registry) really promoting the technical side of designing for the .mobi web, the speculative element overshadowed it.

I ran a web usage/classification survey of .mobi sTLD in 2008 to see what the sites were being used for and the percentage for different uses. Most of the domains were parked on Godaddy's PPC landing page for unused domains. The landing page was mobile web compatible but these sites were being considered active - something that they were not .In fact the same trend is present with .co ccTLD with just over 40% of domains registered being hosted on Godaddy's nameservers.

It could be argued that .mobi was hit by the perfect storm. The economic situation disintegrated in 2008 with the collapse of major banks and the drying up of easy credit - the credit that had fueled a lot of domain name speculation. The other aspect was that ICANN was shamed into taking action against domain tasting. That freed up a lot of domains that were otherwise being tasted or kited. The .eu ccTLD also had a part to play. A lot of non-EU speculators (rather than ordinary domainers) had bought up huge numbers of .eu ccTLD domains thinking that they were going to make a lot of money. They nearly destroyed the ccTLD and it became a Dead Zone for the EU with hardly any development and no confidence in the registry (Eurid) or the ccTLD itself. The EU has 27 official languages but most of the speculation was in the form of English language domain names that might have looked good to speakers of US/Canadian English but the terms were not in use in European English. These speculators took major losses in their .eu portfolios. Money that would have been recycled and used to speculate in .mobi TLD was locked into useless .eu domain names that couldn't be flipped. This hit the speculative angle of .mobi hard. The other big killer was the iPhone. It was better than many other phones and had a near-web experience for users. So why did users need a specific mobile TLD when what they wanted was available from their .com or .ccTLD bookmarks? The ironic thing was that this, more than any other argument - a technological one - was what really hit .mobi as a technological solution for a real problem. It still has over a million registrations but it is not a .com killer.

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

im pretty sure the people saying .com killer were random people just joining the forum. i cant recall domainers that had most of the "good" mobi saying any of that seriously..

And therein lies another story. The mTLD registry kept back a lot of the good/premium domains for itself so that it could auction them for far more than regfee.

as to the argument about the TLD not being recognizable and normal that is a good argument not to use it currently. but with the new gTLD's people will start to recognize two words separated by a dot is a domain name.

It comes down to advertising budgets. The average person might only recognise one or two TLDs (.com and their ccTLD). Anything outside that set of known TLDs would be strange. It will take a lot of advertising for those new gTLDs to gain any market share.

people saying this onslaught of new gTLD's are not going to normalize them are dreaming.

Well .eu was supposed to be the ccTLD for the European Union. It was supposed to provide an alternative to .com for residents in the EU. It doesn't. It is a non-core TLD and its usage figures are down at .biz level. Most of the registrations are brand protection and if they are even active in DNS are PPC parked or pointing to the primary brand website. There will be a flurry of publicity but it may well die away as people go back to concentrating on their primary brand websites in other TLDs and ccTLDs. There will be some major successes but they could take five years or so to happen.

the public doesnt care about registries losing money - this is a massive scale thing about to happen and all that matters is weird TLD exposure at first. itll be weird for a while then it will be normal.

Possibly. But there has been an ongoing consolidation trend over the past five years or so where domain reigstration patterns, at a country level basis, are focusing on the .com/ccTLD axis. The non-core TLDs (net/org/biz/info/mobi/asia) generally don't seem to be increasing and many registrations there are legacy brand protection registrations. The hard part for the new gTLD registries will be to break that trend and get people registering new gTLD domains and developing sites in that ngTLD. The most recent example, .co ccTLD, has been good at marketing but there has been no widespread development and usage of .co ccTLD. Most of the domains are either on holding pages or PPC parking. COInternet did a great job in marketing the ccTLD but it just hasn't the volume of development to make it stand out for end users when compared to the ccTLD/com axis (that axis generally occupies more than 80% of many country level domain markets). Some new gTLDs will be successful. The large city gTLDs might do well but most will not. The big problem is that some of the new gTLD registries have the same people backing them as were involved in domain tasting. And that's going to be used against these new gTLDs when the fighting gets dirty. Whatever happens though, it is going to be an interesting few years for the domain business.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Keith]

im still around but most my .mobi domains are not

Mine either but I still hold a few. Planning on riding them straight to the ground...

 

[Keith]

the rest seems unbelievable looking back

And amazingly some are looking forward, much to the registries delight I suppose!

At one point I had about 500 .mobi and now it's about 15. Just waiting for drop dates to hit before it gets cut in half. Lesson learned and moving on...

 

[Jasonn]

mobi was the best pump and dump tld yet and we all have rick to thank for that.(mostly) i feel for all the people who spent 40k or more on a single mobi domain...there were a number of them. i myself spent close to 10k that i'll never get back. if only i would of instantly sold during the hype...

 

[carob]

Even in 2006 the .mobi domain was never needed and never restricted to just mobile sites, so it was a marketing exercise, not a technical one. How is this relevant now?

Flip forward to 2013. What I think is relevant to day is that .mobi was backed by big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Visa, and it achieved publiciity, 1m registrations and high auction prices - and then domain resale prices crashed and also the company behind the TLD, Dotmobi (originally called MTLD), became insolvent. Luckily Afilias agree to take them over so the extension did not just disappear. Actual use of the domains appears very low, though no one knows for sure about that.

So I would look hard at the viability of any new TLD, even one with big name backers and promotion - plenty will go bust. .Mobi did.

 

[jmcc]

if im a food truck and dont have a website yet and i decide to start one - how is operating on foodtruck.mobi fragmentation of the internet? im a mobile food truck.. thats my site.

Where would your hypothetical customers be based and what TLD would they generally use? More precisely, what TLDs do they immediately recognise?

Using .mobi for your trucking business might sound great but it could also be the same as advertising on some back road in the desert compared to advertising on large streets with .com or .ccTLD. The argument was more accurately about the fragmentation of the web with effectively a new "standard" being developed for .mobi that differed from the ordinary standard HTML and webpages.

LOL dotcom killer - who was saying that? maybe a few nutcases on the forums but none of this talk was ever taken seriously. there were also people who thought for every .com there should be a matching .mobi mobile website like you're describing.

There was a lot of fanboyism but the dotcom killer argument tended to come from those hyping the TLD. The .co was no different with .co ccTLD being presented as the dotcom killer because "all" of the good domains were gone in .com TLD.

The problem was that people really didn't understand how domains are registered across TLDs. This is what .mobi looked like in relation to com/net/org/biz/info/asia/tel on August 2012:
http://www.hosterstats.com/mobi-stld.php

Some of those domains were owned by the owner of the .com and were brand protection registrations but that does not mean that they had active websites. Indeed many brand protection registrations redirect to the brand's primary website or have no active website.

When it comes to new TLDs, It is as if domainers think in generics whereas businesses think in terms of brands. The new gTLD registries are probably hoping for the magic brand protection boost to get through the first 300K registrations. However it doesn't generally work out that way as .asia and .tel have shown.

Regards...jmcc

---------- Post added at 02:12 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:58 AM ----------

What is funny in this business is that 'new' extensions are now released at a rapid pace, like one every year or so. So memories of the previous landrush are still fresh, domainers are more cautious because they haven't had enough time to forget the lessons of the past :bingo:

I've always wondered if the reason for ICANN's new gTLDs is based on the fear of ccTLDs eventually overtaking the com/net/org TLDs. The domain tasting and kiting issue with the gTLDs effectively forced the growth of the ccTLDs in the same period. It was ICANN's incompetence that led to the domain tasting and kiting and, the growth of ccTLDs as a threat to the gTLDs. Prior to 2005 or so, almost everything was dotcom orientated.

Regards...jmcc

 

[mjnels]

im pretty sure the people saying .com killer were random people just joining the forum. i cant recall domainers that had most of the "good" mobi saying any of that seriously..

as to the argument about the TLD not being recognizable and normal that is a good argument not to use it currently. but with the new gTLD's people will start to recognize two words separated by a dot is a domain name.

yes some of the registries will lose money... yes domainers will lose money.. yes lots of stuff.. but DESPITE that - as a whole people will start to eventually accept anything is a domain. no this doesnt make .COM's worthless - but it wont be so shady to use a .biz or .info or .shop anymore..

people saying this onslaught of new gTLD's are not going to normalize them are dreaming. the public doesnt care about registries losing money - this is a massive scale thing about to happen and all that matters is weird TLD exposure at first. itll be weird for a while then it will be normal.

 

[Kate]

That's it JMCC, the problem as usual is development (the lack thereof).

A TLD does not gain public recognition without a critical mass of bona fide development.
The redirects, the inactive domains, the purely defensive registrations or the MFA websites do not count. So the registration figures only tell a part of the story.

The TLDs à la .co are overshadowed by speculation and non-usage, which indicates - put simply - that there are no so many genuine end users with development plans and willing to enhance the extensions, they are not so interested in the first place. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned for those who care.

 

[mjnels]

the "public recognition" game is over.

people hoping even 1 of the new TLD's will gain "public recognition" are looking at it in the wrong way i think. it will be more like "every word in existence is a TLD and we're OK with that because TLD's dont equal trust"

 

[carob]

To answer the question "Why .mobi never had a chance" I'd say the main answer is that it was always going to be hard to persuade people- endusers, not domainers - that they need two domains (one for desktop and one for mobile). That would take a lot of marketing and respected companies visibly using .mobi and that still might not work, especially when people are warned to avoid phishing domains. So from the start it was always a gamble for everyone except the registrars.

The hypothetical advantage that was offered was that it would make it easier for users to find mobile content and so they would go to those sites more and also use mobile internet more. The prime mover behind .mobi was Nokia - and they basically failed to see smartphones coming and so they crashed out into the arms of Microsoft later. So how did Nokia persuade big companies to invest in setting up the Dotmobi company? What did those companies hope to earn from it? They put in a lot more money than most domainers did.

well the problem with blaming the hypesters is almost all of them lost money too.

There are a few people who made money on .mobi, if they did not buy expensive aftermarket domains, and then sold out before the bubble burst.


Dotmobi themselves were hyping their product, and with the big name investors on board like Microsoft and Google, it looked more likely than most to achieve that elusive "recognition" we're talking about if it got used by them. But it didn't happen.

But the investors in the Dotmobi company, not the domain, also lost serious money. So people who set up new TLDs that fail will also lose money, lots of it.

Look who lost €12,000,000 on .mobi - these are the original shareholders and how many shares they bought at €1 per share.
So three of these companies probably lost seven figure sums.

Google: 600,000
GSM 600, 000
Hutchison 600,000
Microsoft 1,800,000
Nokia 1,800,000
Orascom 600,000
Samsung 600,000
Syniverse 600,000
Ericsson 600,000
Telefonica Moviles 600,000
Telecom Italia 600,000
T-Mobile 600,000
Visa International 600,000
Vodafone 1,800,000

In case you are wondering, that is public info available from cro.ie about the company structure of Dotmobi - it shows who set up the company and how much they invested.

 

[Keith]

The only tld to say mobile until .mobile...

Bottom line is .mobi went down in flames. Ashes are all that remain :wave:

 

[mjnels]

......in the past, but might in the future.

First there was a native app boom now it is time for web apps and last but not least the time will come for mobile websites. Your average business and developer doesn’t need any kind of app to have a mobile presence. When this time comes people will realize that there are many great .mobi names to register or to buy for a fraction of the price of other tlds. The best part is that .mobi is the only tld that says “I am mobile”. We all know that technically the tld doesn’t matter, but from a marketing perspective I think .mobi has a big advantage and I just can’t stop saying it, but .mobi just looks cooler than all the other strange possibilities like m + dot, wap + whatever, slash + something awkward etc. I know it has been a long and hard road for .mobi domainers, but I still believe .mobi will have its chance in the future...

Read this and keep dotmobi in mind:
When Responsive Web Design Is Bad For SEO

http://searchengineland.com/when-responsive-web-design-is-bad-for-seo-149109

i agree with you and this was my mindset in 2006 anyway... however, with a bajillian TLD's coming if people eventually consider it a viable alternative - it will just be one of many hundreds of choices. that spreads the "values" a bit thin for a domainer..

The only tld to say mobile until .mobile...

:lol:

i keep checking their website for them to delete this: "the only ICANN approved mobile specific domain"

 

[freeflow]

i keep checking their website for them to delete this: "the only ICANN approved mobile specific domain"

I think it should read:
"the only ICANN approved domain that sounds like it has something do do with mobile"


Hi mjnels! It's good to see that you are still here.

 

[mjnels]

I think it should read:
"the only ICANN approved domain that sounds like it has something do do with mobile"


Hi mjnels! It's good to see that you are still here.

until .mobile is released :o

im still around but most my .mobi domains are not... sure feels like 2006 here though with 3 .mobi threads at the top of the forum

 

[mjnels]

i always thought the idea of holding like 1,000+ .mobi was unsustainable anyway - even when they were selling (to domainers)

only registered like 60 in landrush.. 60x$60=$3,600.. the idea was to "trade up" until i had around that amount all for free at least.. then got a bit caught up.. the rest seems unbelievable looking back

 

[Keith]

There is nothing special with .mobi, it failed along other TLDs for one simple reason: there is no need for another TLD, and also we don't need more fragmentation of the WWW.

Since .mobi was buried (that is roughly 5 years ago), mobile Internet has soared, the tablets in particular are very popular today.
But all those technology advances have done nothing to bring some relevance back to .mobi.

In fact, the distinction between desktop and mobile has blurred further.
The concept was inherently flawed.

I agree that it's blurred. I use iPhone 95 percent of the time for Internet surfing. The majority of sites are on point. In fact, it's rare to find one that doesn't render well.

 

[mjnels]

There is nothing special with .mobi, it failed along other TLDs for one simple reason: there is no need for another TLD, and also we don't need more fragmentation of the WWW.

Since .mobi was buried (that is roughly 5 years ago), mobile Internet has soared, the tablets in particular are very popular today.
But all those technology advances have done nothing to bring some relevance back to .mobi.

In fact, the distinction between desktop and mobile has blurred further.
The concept was inherently flawed.

actually the special thing with .mobi is we've never seen an alt TLD bubble quite like that. nobody expected that..the angle the registry was trying to sell was nonsense, they were just domain names.. not part of any standard. when you look at it like this it doesn't fragment the web anymore than .info fragments the web. they weren't going to succeed becoming a "mobile standard"

BUT - nearly everyone on the forums were saying the reason .mobi would fail is because "people dont use the internet on their phones for everything." that statement was so hilariously foolish and nearly everybody was saying it. "oh maybe things like sports and news but whos going to use the internet on a cell phone" :lol:

 

[Kate]

Well the cell phones aren't phones anymore But you can still use them to call though - it has become some sort of extra feature
The primitive cellphones weren't good for anything Internet. But today's smartphones can accommodate standard websites, thus making .mobi irrelevant. Technology advances have nullified the justification for crippled down websites.

 

[mjnels]

Well the cell phones aren't phones anymore But you can still use them to call though - it has become some sort of extra feature
The primitive cellphones weren't good for anything Internet. But today's smartphones can accommodate standard websites, thus making .mobi irrelevant. Technology advances have nullified the justification for crippled down websites.

thats what im saying. nearly everyone at DNF had the opinion that internet on mobile devices will never be that big of thing except for certain things like news/sports.

im out of touch with technology these days but people were acting like technology was going to stay in the same place as it was in 2006 then somehow associating .mobi with their argument even though the two were separate things that had nothing to do with each other..

 

[JB Lions]

"but might in the future." Let it go. It's like you're sliding down the cliff and there are people throwing you rope, some other things like branches you can grab a hold of and you're like, I want to taste the bottom. Does splat, really sound like splat. The reasons you gave in the other thread don't holp up, this one doesn't either.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG3m9FIAs54"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG3m9FIAs54[/ame]

Plus, that article is a ridiculous one. His nonsense gets taken apart in the comment section. I use responsive themes, 0 issues. Not sure what he's talking about with load times. I just did a search on one of my sites in Google on my Iphone. Clicked it, it loaded before I finished saying one thousand one. Looks great on both desktop and mobile and loads fast.

 

[dompro]

I have only one answer to this subject:

The mighty Google decided so, everyone else obeyed.

There is no SEO benefit of running mobile version of the site on mobi domain vs the main .com. so why bother