Domains, Domain Names For Sale & Domain Name Registration

Domains, the dotMobi effect.

Yesterday saw the auction of the TechSupport.mobi on Bido.com, the first dotMobi domain to be auctioned on the site. The auction was a mix bag event, not as many people as you would usually see, but with special guest Pinky Brand, Director of Global Sales at dotMobi it turned out to be a very informative and interesting interview. So what effect has the dotMobi extention had on the domains market and where is it going? With developed dotMobi sites predicted to increase six fold over the next year, and with rapid advancements in mobile handset technology and mobile search, it will certainly be and interesting period over the next 18 months for the extention. It certainly has my backing.

For those of you who do not know too much about dotMobi domains the .mobi extention is a sponsored TLD. Contrary to much down talk by other domainers, I really like .mobi domains and with investors such as Vodafone, Visa, Nokia, Google and Microsoft, even the big boys (and girls) are serious about the domain. To be quite frank I don’t understand why many domainers, including some of the famous ones too are not keen on dotMobi. Personally I think it is short sightedness in terms of monetisation potential. Sure a .com is great, because you can get type-in traffic and decent parking revenue, but come on the mobile web is becoming huge and I guarantee at the moment that 99% of domainers do not have domains which feature in mobile search. Why? Because they haven’t been bothered to look into what they could be missing out on and more fool them.

The classic comeback to this by most is “well if I want my domain to be ok for mobiles I can just tweek it to be served up for both web and mobile users.” Again another uneducated response. The whole point of dotMobi is that there are certain guidelines in place to be adhered to so that mobile websites are developed to be optimised for mobile web users, with quicker loading times, easier navigation and as a result a dramatically reduced browsing cost when your mobile bill comes through the post.

Another classic response is, “well my site looks fine on the iPhone” wow thats great… your website looks good on a handset which accounted for just 1.12% of global mobile downloads in February 2009…get real… the majority of people who browse the mobile web do not have £200-400 handsets. They are normal people with a half decent Nokia, Samsung or Sony Ericsson. The masses. If you are not catering to these with your generic.com…more fool you Mr Big shot.

So how do you go about utilising a .mobi and developing it to take advantage of the mobile web. Well for a start dotMobi offers a certain “protection” from transcoders, which mobile operators use. The dotMobi extention also appears to have a “weighting” in the mobile web, similar to that of a .com on a US search or a .co.uk on Google UK, as the search engines want to return the most relevant result to the user, common sense would suggest that it would be better to serve up a mobile site to someone who is browsing via a mobile handset!

A few basic development guidelines on developing mobile domains include building the site in XHTML and submitting a separate XML sitemap to the search engines to appear in their mobile search engine results pages (Mobile SERPs or mSERPs) the key is focus on functionality and navigation, being able to serve up the correct information quickly. Mobile web users are a different species of “surfer” to that of traditional PC based web users. Obviously connection on a mobile handset is signficantly slower than desktop search, so you need to get the most relevant content served up to your visitor as soon as possible. If it takes them too many clicks to find what they want, they will bounce. The upside however is that click through rates on mobile search adverts are significantly higher that that PC based ads, almost ten times in some cases.

Fact is mobile is the way forward, and whether domainers like it or not the internet has two faces whether they choose to cater for both and take advantage of the potential the dotMobi domain extention brings to mobile domains, remains to be seen.

Thanks for listening

Gary

Tags: Domains, dotmobi, Mobile Domains, pinky brand