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......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
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
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.

Very good comment! :bingo:
 
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There must be a lot of defensive registrations. Surprisingly it's still growing but there is hardly any TLD that isn't at least experiencing natural growth. .tel may be the only one. .name also lost a lot of volume.

I think many domainers are still owning .mobi domains along .pro .biz .xxx .whatever etc, TLDs that everybody should know are doomed imho.

Interestingly enough I actually find quite a bit of sites online using the .biz extension. Sure the internet is not swamped with .biz, but every now and then when I'm searching for a business using google, I come across a site using .biz. So I wouldn't call that one a total loss.

As for the .mobi extension, I think when it first came out it was a good idea in theory in what it would be used for. But things just went in a different direction in regards to mobile websites. When you go to any website online, most of the big popular sites automatically send you to a mobile version of their site or offer you a mobile view of their site when going to their main domain. So the need for the .mobi extension was not as necessary as people would have thought. Why get another extension when you can just redirect mobile visitors to a sub domain that has a mobile version of the site?

Also with data speeds getting faster and faster on mobile devices, I'm starting to see less of a need for mobile sites. Many mobile devices load the desktop views of sites just fine and with pinch zoom and multi touch functionality, navigating has become a piece of cake. Technology advanced forward over the years making the mobile version of sites no longer a necessity. Sure there are still times where a mobile version may come in handy. But for the most part, I expect to see more use of web apps as well as websites without the need of a mobile version depending upon how graphics and multimedia intensive it is.
 
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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.
The problem is that in a way .mobi was pushing for trimmed-down websites, wap-style. Dragging the pace of technology advances down, not up.

In my view, mobile Internet had to evolve to the point that the distinction between mobile and desktop would ultimately blur - which is a reality today. Then a TLD for mobile devices becomes obsolete - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy :]
The mobile Internet just wouldn't take off with 3110 Nokia phones, 2.5' screens and numeric keypads.
I have always thought that consumers wouldn't accept that sort of online experience, and until conditions improve, usage would therefore be limited to essential services like online banking, news or bookings for example.

Fast forward into 2013, we are still confronted with absurd TLDs.
 
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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.
 
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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
 
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The problem is that in a way .mobi was pushing for trimmed-down websites, wap-style. Dragging the pace of technology advances down, not up.

In my view, mobile Internet had to evolve to the point that the distinction between mobile and desktop would ultimately blur - which is a reality today. Then a TLD for mobile devices becomes obsolete - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy :]
The mobile Internet just wouldn't take off with 3110 Nokia phones, 2.5' screens and numeric keypads.
I have always thought that consumers wouldn't accept that sort of online experience, and until conditions improve, usage would therefore be limited to essential services like online banking, news or bookings for example.

Fast forward into 2013, we are still confronted with absurd TLDs.

hmm not sure what you're saying here. cause "trimmed down" websites are the way to go for mobile.

nobody wants to pinch and scroll full websites.. its not ideal. technology is not completely the answer in this case.. it doesnt mean you need a special TLD for this - but you certainly need to design something from the ground up unique for mobile.


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.[/B]

where in the world are you getting this information from.. they went bust? became insolvent? not accurate dude.

you mean a lot of domainers lost money? that isnt a bust for the registry man - thats a boon.
 
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where in the world are you getting this information from.. they went bust? became insolvent? not accurate dude.

Why do you say that? Didn't you read the news?

http://www.elliotsblog.com/mobi-numbers-arent-pretty-7261

In 2009 mTLD had a loss of €3.5 million on a turnover of €6.4 million, compared to a loss of €324,000 the year before on turnover of €9 million. Total assets less liabilities (eg money owed to creditors) in 2009 was €1.7 million.”

http://paidcontent.org/2010/02/13/419-dotmobi-sells-mobi-domain-name-operator/

Or get the company's financial statements yourself from the Companies Registration Office Ireland http://cro.ie

These are publicly reported, objectively verifiable facts where anyone can obtain the source documents to see for themselves.
 
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hmm interesting. im having trouble searching that cro.ie site tho.. whats the direct link? i searched mobi and got nothing

so wait a minute.. how is the .mobi registry not profitable overall? its larger than most cctlds and sold by almost every registrar in the world.. they're not profitable at all?
 
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hmm interesting. im having trouble searching that cro.ie site tho.. whats the direct link? i searched mobi and got nothing

Company search address -just search for Dotmobi
http://www.cro.ie/search/CompanySearch.aspx

The company was originally called MTLD then traded as Dotmobi then in 2010 became a subsidiary of Afiias - Google, Microsoft, Visa and all the other tech companies transferred all their founding stockholdings to Afilias in 2010. So for post 2010 I guess you need to get Afilias reports from Cro.ie to see what they say - possibly nothing about Dotmobi.

---------- Post added at 12:12 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:09 PM ----------

so wait a minute.. how is the .mobi registry not profitable overall? its larger than most cctlds and sold by almost every registrar in the world.. they're not profitable at all?

Good question for Afiias or anyone who wants to try studying their publicly available accounts at cro.ie
 
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hmm not sure what you're saying here. cause "trimmed down" websites are the way to go for mobile.

nobody wants to pinch and scroll full websites.. its not ideal.

I would've thought the same thing before I started using mobile exclusively for Internet access.

Right now for example, I'm on NP pinching and scrolling with no complaints. Sometimes I actually find myself choosing the desktop site over the mobile version of various sites. There's usually more options available on the desktop and it renders damn near as fast... At this point "trimmed down" is the last thing I want to see!
 
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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:
 
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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.

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.

sdsinc said:
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.

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.

people who lost 6 figures gambled big time. they knew the risk and choose to take it. i played the game too and im not going around blaming anyone.
 
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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
 
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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.
 
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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
 
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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.
 
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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"
 
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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.

This is what ticked me off more than anything, A group of blind idiots hyping a TLD for their own benefit or their own insecurity, trying to convince themselves they made a good decision..

I asked one newbie who lost a substantial amount, whether or not the posts he read had influenced his decision to invest, the answer I got back was YES.. The less experienced will always look up to the more experienced domainer, but in the case of Mobi, the hypers only pretended to know what they were talking about, they came off as knowledgeable but in reality they weren't, they were not even successful domainers, many are bottom feeders to this very day.
 
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well the problem with blaming the hypesters is almost all of them lost money too.

so its not some conspiracy... they believed the stuff they were saying themselves. trust me i was there. i made some mistakes too but tried to never attach "hopes and dreams" to my sales.

e.g. like saying: "this will go up in value fast!" (people said that about the LLL even though they were falling)
 
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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.
 
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well the problem with blaming the hypesters is almost all of them lost money too.

so its not some conspiracy... they believed the stuff they were saying themselves. trust me i was there. i made some mistakes too but tried to never attach "hopes and dreams" to my sales.

e.g. like saying: "this will go up in value fast!" (people said that about the LLL even though they were falling)

I wasn't referring to you MJ, Your were one of a few that stayed clear of selling anyone on it.. Your so incredibly honest in your posts, I wouldn't think for a minute you would do that.... And as I said before, I'm happy you made a few sales and turned a profit, that's what domaining is all about...

Your right though, the hypsters believed what they were posting, I don't doubt that, What I take issue with is they were predicting Mobi's success, based mostly on speculation they fabricated in their own minds.. When you consider that most members on forums are newbies, it's almost like a online school to them, they absorb all that information.. Some are good at sorting it all out and making the right decision, but many are not, many dove right into it and lost their ass, which is unfortunate.
 
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