.mobi iPhone/iPad/Mobile Sites, is it worth having .mobi?

[neogrant]

Hi,

I'm after a little advice on a few things really, which hopefully someone can answer.

Is it worth purchasing a .mobi domain for the likes of iPhone/iPad etc? Or instead adding a sub domain like mobile.site.com

Advice appreciated.

Thanks

 

[qO_Op]

...

 

[freeflow]

microsoft.mobi

Quote from another forum:

Unlike its .net, .org, and biz cousins, the .mobi site is the only one which does not redirect to microsoft.com. If the .mobi site stays, that will indicate the significant value MS believes .mobi has.

It's not.

The closest approximation to the shape of the world is an oblate spheroid or oblate ellipsoid.

You're right the world is not round, but it's not flat either.

 

[Zonqor]

isn't .mobi suppose to be that, with websites to fit on phones. Why use an application that a third party made instead of using the internet website for mobiles.. what went wrong??

 

[carob]

isn't .mobi suppose to be that, with websites to fit on phones. Why use an application that a third party made instead of using the internet website for mobiles.. what went wrong??

Mobi can be used for any website now, it does not have to be mobile and in many cases it is not. The failed company behind .mobi, called MTLD and later Dotmobi, gave up on requiring .mobi domains to have any mobile content, so after that the domain had no reason to exist and has half as many registrations as .biz.

Mobile websites are growing but that does not mean .mobi is growing - assuming mobile growth means .mobi growth is a well known way to lose money, domainers lost a fortune that way.

 

[scandiman]

Mobi can be used for any website now, it does not have to be mobile and in many cases it is not.

Vast majority of .mobi sites I've seen do focus on mobile web

The failed company behind .mobi, called MTLD and later Dotmobi, gave up on requiring .mobi domains to have any mobile content...

You're right in that mtld has done nothing regarding compliance, and yet they still continue to this day to require it as seen in their registrar agreements. Here's the text from Moniker's legal page: http://www.moniker.com/legal.jsp

25. Dot-MOBI REGISTRATIONS

Registered Name Holder shall:
.
.
.
Acknowledge and agree that they must comply with the requirements, standards, policies, procedures and practices set forth in the dotmobi Style Guide (www.mtld.mobi) and consent to the monitoring of the website as described in the dotmobi Style Guide monitoring guidelines (www.mtld.mobi) for compliance with the Style Guide.​

Anymore this only serves as a deterrent to usage IMO. People who pay attention to the fine print could pass on using .mobi because of these stipulations to abide to a Style Guide that can't even be found at the URL they provide. If someone has the patience to actually dig and find it at the mobiforge site they will discover the Style Guide hasn't been updated since 2006 which in the life of mobile web is ancient history.

...so after that the domain had no reason to exist and has half as many registrations as .biz.

Some have argued for years that the extension had no reason to exist at all, and others are on the other end of the spectrum that the branding option of a mobile extension is useful regardless of the lack of compliance, so there is not any consensus on the topic of reasons for existence. I'm not sure what relevance there is to comparing to .biz registrations, but what reason does it have to exist? There is no consensus there either, nor regarding all the extensions pending at ICANN.

 

[carob]

You're right in that mtld has done nothing regarding compliance, and yet they still continue to this day to require it as seen in their registrar agreements. Here's the text from Moniker's legal page: http://www.moniker.com/legal.jsp

25. Dot-MOBI REGISTRATIONS

Registered Name Holder shall:
.
.
.
Acknowledge and agree that they must comply with the requirements, standards, policies, procedures and practices set forth in the dotmobi Style Guide (www.mtld.mobi) and consent to the monitoring of the website as described in the dotmobi Style Guide monitoring guidelines (www.mtld.mobi) for compliance with the Style Guide.​

Hi you are right that info is on the web, but not enforced. But beyond that, there is another thread on Namepros about this - a user recently emailed Dotmobi about this point and got a reply that clearly admitted there were no longer any requirements and you can use the domain any way you want.

So why the requirements are still published when they have no positive effects is hard to understand. But Dotmobi is a failed company so it is no surprise, and another good warning to domainers to avoid .mobi.

About .mobi no longer having a reason to exist - it was explicitly introduced to guarantee users could find mobile-friendly content, so once the guarantee was dropped it had no reason to exist. But you could say that of many extensions that have been - and are - used differently from the way they were originally meant to be.

 

[DU]

About .mobi no longer having a reason to exist - it was explicitly introduced to guarantee users could find mobile-friendly content, so once the guarantee was dropped it had no reason to exist.

I think it is obvious that this was never going to happen.

The problem is that this is looking at things from the wrong perspective. People don't go to "random" sites. People aren't likely to type in "random" .mobi.

If you want to create a mobile presence for your own brand on a .mobi then you are personally saying "this is mobile ready".

Trying to put a global 100% verifiable face on a platform or concept is hard. However, if you reduce things down to an actual company, brand, presence it makes far more sense.

If I direct MY customers to MyShopFront.mobi then I can assure them a positive mobile experience.

Most people think like domainers. Even marketing experts in the domain fold think about SEO, Google and NOT the end results.

That's all. It's dead for domainers. It's dead as a standard. It can STILL work.

 

[scandiman]

But Dotmobi is a failed company....

I guess it depends on how you measure failure. If you measure against the broken promises and expectations from mTLD and it's founders then yes it failed to deliver. But the early coalition of corporate founders is gone and today mTLD is a wholly owned subsidiary of Afilias, a registry service provider that's been around for over a decade and manages .org, .info and more. With about a million active registrations and other fee based tech products like go.mobi and Device Atlas, mtld is earning money and hence not failing.

 

[carob]

mtld is earning money and hence not failing.

That is impossible to know. Yes they are taking in fees, but that does not at all mean making a profit. Since they are a subsidiary of a privately held company, there are not published financial reports and probably no way of knowing what exactly the income and profit or loss of Dotmobi now is.

In the last year before their founders all dumped them to Afilias - probably the biggest creditor - MTLD/Dotmobi lost over €2m on a registration pool of about 1m domains, and the year before that the loss was of the same order of magnitude - clearly a big failure. Publicly available info that - and if anyone wants they can get the Afilias info from the Irish companies office website and see what - if anything - it says about their new Dotmobi subsidiary.

 

[DU]

In the last year before their founders all dumped them to Afilias - probably the biggest creditor - MTLD/Dotmobi lost over €2m on a registration pool of about 1m domains, and the year before that the loss was of the same order of magnitude - clearly a big failure.

This makes me wonder how something like Cointernet is planning on continuing to maintain positive cashflow.

More successful companies have lost far more It's the new Capitalistic Smoke and Mirrors way.