According to RegistrarStats.com the Top Level Domain (TLD) .Mobi fell below 1 Million domain name registrations.
.Mobi hit a high of 1.2 Million registrations in January 2014 before the new gTLD were released.
.Mobi increased registration from late 2011, from below 1 Million hitting 1.2 Million on January.
We can’t peg the losses of 200,000 domain registrations since January just to the new gTLD’s, but it certainly could be a factor which is why the headline has a question mark.
What do you think
The .mobi TLD has been losing steam for months, even before the new strings were introduced:
http://www.hosterstats.com/DomainNameCounts2014.php
Personally, I would guess holders are losing interest due to the lack of relevance of this TLD.
.tel has lost a lot of regs too.
.mobi was never a hit, it lack(ed|s) the (.)buzz
.Info has been on the decline for two years in anticipation of the new TLD launch – roughly 25% of registrations lost
Since domain investor speculation in all TLDs is considerable it would be interesting if someone could estimate how many domainer-held .COMs there have been each year vs. currently.
I suspect there is some shift of focus to pursuing premium keywords amongst the hundreds of new TLD launches and spending less time pursuing .COM drops or participating in .COM auctions.
Exactly, which is why it’s a great time to pick up meaningful .com names on drop or for cheap in aftermarket. Or even hand reg. “Everyone” has dropped their carts and tools, left the mines and gone above ground to see what all the noise it about…
…When everyone is over ‘there’ , is when the very few legt are over ‘here’ finding what know one else is seeing.
An easy mistake to make when looking at .INFO gTLD. The .INFO is a boom and bust TLD. Its registry attempted, successfully at first, to buy market share by effectively giving the domains away for free. This drove registrations but was followed by a massive drop just over a year later. The same pattern can be seen for a few years. The low registration fees made it attractive for microsites and there were many web developers sticking small sites on .INFO domains with Adsense. But when the credit crunch hit in 2008 and Google changed a lot of its algorithm (and tightened up Adsense payouts), then a lot of these microsites disappeared (the renewal fees also made some of the microsites model unsustainable. It is a non-core TLD (ccTLD/.COM/NET/ORG being the core TLDs in most country level markets) and there has been a general trend away from non-core TLDs over the last few years. The new gTLDs were not a factor.
The iphone was the main reason for mobi’s first bubble pop …
The new gtld is just the final nail in the coffin.
Does anyone remember Frank’s LinkFest posts on his blog (Circa Dec 2007)
http://domainnamesales.com/sevenmile/2007-12/thursday-linkfest-2/#content
MUSIC.MOBI = USD 616K
GAMES.MOBI = USD 401K
SPORTS.MOBI = USD 101K
MOVIES.MOBI = USD 82K
PHOTOS.MOBI = USD 51K
VIDEOS.MOBI = USD 51K
Alvaro says “I am not planning on developing these names, I am planing on selling these sometime in the near future.” ..
***FS***Sell Alvaro .. run like the wind and sell. This man will be joining Dr. Van Neeste in the land of irrelevance shortly”
Ummmm…I think Frank called it in 2007.
Pump…Pump…Pump…POP!
.mobi was quite of a bubble with some $9.5 million recorded sales (of 3,385 domain names, making it $2,800.46 each). But those were the times when new TLDs were not at the door.
millions wasted on a tld that never amounted to anything. i wonder how many millions will be wasted on certain new tlds that will never amount to anything?
But some new TLD investments paid off nicely including .me, .tv and .co
So like anything else when you chat about investment there will be winners and losers
Here is the thing with the new gtld’s if Joe Public is to grasp the concept of GTLD’s then either they all work or none work at all It does not have to be any given extension that would be more popular than another, if someone is looking for a brand of clothes, they may type in Brand.Fashion, Brand.Clothing etc… The public will have to grasp the concept of putting a dot in the middle of the content type, or action they are searching out.
So in reality if they take off, then not every registry maybe a homerun, but there will be domains within each registry that do have tremendous value. In realizing this new reality, and concept that is another question all together.
Personally I feel the .mobi drop could be a few big holders, or even domainers that with the onslaught of the gtld’s, and lack of sales maybe have decided to start cutting their losses. Regardless .mobi was on a downtrend, even if the gtld’s would not have launched, we would still see drops in .mobi.
Mobi was not on a downtrend over the last few years. Most aboveboard domainer interest evaporated, along with the aftermarket, but there are/were silent investors who kept regging names, sometimes 1000 at a time. Most three letter Mobis are taken. Every month regs rose a little until the new TLDs came along.
It would not surprise me if that interest has shifted, perhaps permanently. But speculator interest at reg fee has little effect on aftermarket values, as Mobi has found and ngTLD investors should realize.
Look at the chart guy that is what it is therefore
.Mobi was on a uptick until this year
The numbers are only part of the explanation, Michael,
The .MOBI was not doing well for years and there was a lot of Chinese/Japanese registration volume that supported the figures for a while. There are a lot of me-too domains (just because they are registered in .COM then they should be worth something in new TLDs) dropping now. The new gTLDs are not a major factor in the numerical decline of .MOBI.
a million registrations = ” not doing well” according to special TLD numbers analysts… gee whiz
didnt you guys know it was supposed to get 50% of .com registrations?
yay self appointed experts trying to sound like they know what theyre talking about
That’s a fair point, about the million registrations, but it doesn’t mean a million paid-registrations; at one point, you get a .INFO for free for registering a dot com; who knows how else they got registrations.
Yet, dot info has more Registrations than all gTLDs combined. That’s astonishing!
Some .INFO keyword names are fetching huge dollars, in the tens of thousands in today’s market. Check Flippa, Godaddy, Sedo etc
The health of a TLD is about more than simple registration volume. It has a lot to do with how people use it and how usage develops over time. As for being a “self appointed expert”, having run the only full .MOBI web usage and development survey that accurately classified the TLD’s usage and development and having tracked and mapped .MOBI over the years ranks higher than some random poster on the web who does not track TLDs, does not understand registration trends in TLDs, and does not run web usage and development surveys.
The development pattern for a healthy TLD is quite different from that of a highly speculated TLD in that there is a growth of usage and development of the TLD as small businesses develop sites on the TLD and use it as their primary brand. When a TLD does not develop like that, its registrations base becomes heavily dependent on brand protection registrations, cyberwarehousing and speculation. Sometimes, the registry will, in an effort to drive up registration volume, introduce IDN registrations. This can temporarily boost the numbers but many of them will end up on Sedo or other auction sites. And many of these registrations will drop a year or too later.
The problem with taking a TLD like .MOBI as a single market is that it ignores the component country level markets. This is where the real battle for acceptance as a global TLD is fought. Strong global TLDs can build significant market share at country market level. While some of this will be brand protection, some will be for development. On 01/May/2014, Godaddy had 33.15% of .MOBI on its DOMAINCONTROL.COM nameservers.
Another indication of the importance of a TLD is the frequency of UDRPs and domain disputes. While most UDRP activity is concentrated in .COM, a lack of activity in an open TLD where anyone can register domains generally points to a lack of interest in defending brands in that TLD. The lack of interest is often down to a lack of traffic and public awareness of the TLD. It can also indicate that brand owners rank the importance of the TLD low enough to adopt a policy of enforcement rather than protection (they no longer consider it necessary to pre-emptively register their brand/trademark in the TLD).
The .MOBI TLD launched in a domain name speculation bubble. Much of the early registration volume was driven by speculation and hype. The problem was that the development didn’t match the hype despite mTLD registry putting a lot of effort into making development easy. As DomainInvestor pointed out, Apple’s Iphone was a game changer for .MOBI. Up to that point, there was a need for a mobile friendly website and .MOBI was the logical choice for this. It even had its own mobile web format and sparse markup. But with the Iphone, that wasn’t needed because it could display ordinary websites. And the Smartphones followed. The increasing screen quality, size and resolution and increasing mobile web bandwidth neutralised a lot of the selling points that had once made .MOBI such a possible winner. There is still a need for mobile web websites and perhaps there is still some demand for .MOBI (while it did slip below the 1 million mark, there are still new registrations each day. But it is not a .COM killer or even a parallel, mobile version of .COM. The market for .MOBI may lie in regions where broadband is not so widely available and people are more reliant on mobile broadband and connectivity.
yes i was there for .mobi and saw what happened, was more involved than a bean counter who cant see the forest for the trees. back up and look at the whole picture… analyze the tree bark later.
its funny isnt it.. a TLD like .mobi gets a million registrations (made up of mostly speculators) and we call it “not doing very well, pathetic” and note that its obviously made up of mostly speculators.
dozens of gTLD get a few thousand registrations each right out of the gate and somehow THATS not the way it was supposed to work either… people calling 50,000 registrations “not very good.”
yea, lets bring back the level of speculation that happened with .mobi because thats gonna make the TLD healthier.
@Richard,
I share your sentiments in your last comment. I did predict on this blog that if one succeeds, all new gTLD succeed, because, what determines their success or failure is a commonality… public grasp, acceptance, and behavior. That was before the Registries f’cked up by being too greedy, and stupid about withholding keywords; the only good thing about n gTLDs is the keywords, how can you then withhold them? If they let everything go right now, and sell the names at $2.99 each, they may have a chance at all three (grasp, acceptance, and behavioral changes). But they have to release everything, NO bullshit about premiums and so on.
@Berkens
Your article about .Mobi actually points to something contrary to your analysis: people are rejecting everything non dot com!
If you take a look at Sedo’s .CO.UK auction ended yesterday, it was flat. The best of the new gTLDs are crawling, so they are not inheriting neither the dot mobi bleed, nor the ccTLDs lackluster performance; it’s all dot com.
One of the 6 measurements I provided in December 2013 to gauge if the new gTLDs will be successful was an increase in dot mobi, dot travel, dot US, dot TV, and dot info; in it I said that if these dont pick up speed, or drops, hen abandon the new gTLDs because these extensions are often better, shorter, tested, has a leg up, better ran, than the new ones. One other metric was to check if ICANN was registered in an extension by ICANN, and forwarded to ICANN.ORG at Godaddy.com, if an extension wasn’t so registered, run. So, your discovery Re: dot Mobi is a count against new gTLDs.
domenclature, your measurement sucks.
seriously, where do you guys come up with these made up feel-good scenarios?? other TLD’s like .travel and .info growing when 100+ options exist now? in what reality would that make any sense?
thats backwards. really take a second to think about it.
@ontheinterweb,
First, you should know that most domain names are purchased by domain investors; at least a substantial part, if you dispute the ‘most’ qualifier. Now, domain investors have a psyche. In that psyche is the fact that end-users, once exposed to a deluge of the new gTLDs, will discover the .INFO, .CO, .NET, .MOBI, .TRAVEL, .TV, and such existing extensions. The thinking being, if some one will crave .WEB, why wouldn’t he crave .NET? If someone will use .XYZ why not .MOBI? There’s no reason why not! So, the exposure, if successful will cause those existing extensions to jump in new activities.
It’s like this, ontheinterweb, there is a city in Southern California called La Mesa; it hadn’t allowed other cab companies except Yellow Cab to be licensed in the city since 1957! So, in 1981 when it tabled motions to allow for a new license for new cabbies, what do you think would happen to the stock, and fortune of unscrupulous, existing, unlicensed cabs that were operating in moonlight heretofore? It will jump! Right? Right!! Since the new ordinance will grant licenses, not just to the new cabs being purchased, but existing vehicles as well. Once the population of the city acquires the new attitude that it’s okay now to use non-Yellow Cab taxis, they can explore all cabbies in existence in the city. Now before you go into the taxi business, purchasing new cars, it is proper to see how the existing non-Yellow Cabs, (that were formally unlicensed, but now licensed [.mobi, ,tv, .info, .travel]) are doing. If Yellow Cab is still getting 100% of the business (dot com), then you may think twice before buying new taxi cabs (new gTLD).
That anecdote, is as rudimentary as it gets.
Surely traffic is the clearest and simplest measure of the success of a gtld?
The more domains bought purely for investment, the less traffic on a gtld. The more active websites with content or services people will use, the more traffic on a gtld. You could measure which gtld’s appear most often in the top 10 search results for the most popular 100 searches as a benchmark. Registrations is a false measure of a gtld’s success.
Each new gtld is one killer website or marketing campaign away from legitimizing the extension in the public’s eyes, but there will never be anything to compete with a .com for a long time yet. The new gtld’s are most likely to be subject to fads and trends in the short term and investment should be based on anticipating these trends, so if the next big site is obamadoes.cooking expect a bunch of copycats to follow. Yes there may be an equivalent .com, but once marketing people latch onto these domains .cooking looks better than .com for an interest based website around which they can build a jingle or a logo or an ad. I would imagine something like online betting sites would be among the first to try something in the mainstream as they are always looking to stand out among the rest and a .club, .vegas, or even a .horse (ie: lucky.horse) could work for them. Atm, most marketing people are wary of using them until they hear Google will hold their hand and not punish their website in it’s rankings for not being a .com. Once Google, Amazon and the .brands roll out their new domains, that’s when the general public will start to take notice and realise it is no longer a .com world.
It’s still way too early to be judging success or failure based on registrations alone. It’s only once we see mainstream sites adopting the domains can success be truly judged. It’s an exciting time and it feels like the internet is starting to come of age a little bit and moving away from it’s origins and embracing what it has become to most people, which is an entertainment, information and commercial medium and these new gtlds may not be understood properly now but the generation that grows up with these will wonder how 5 domains could ever have truly dominated the web for as long as it did and .com will start to lose it’s shine.
.com is for grandparents, dude! I’m a .ninja!
@ontheinterweb I’m sure you did very well in .MOBI. But the reality is that .MOBI makes money for the registry – it was bought out by Aflias a few years ago. I said it was not doing well and based that on the TLD’s level of development and the boom and bust cycle of some groups of registrations. As for the new gTLDs, the numerical decline in .MOBI was not due to new gTLDs. While there are just under 1M .MOBI registrations in the zone at the moment, there are at least 1.8M .MOBI domains that have been dropped and never reregistered. The zonefile for a mature TLD is often quite different to that of the TLD when it launches. The problem for .MOBI is that much of it is undeveloped and many domains drop without ever being developed. This is true of other TLDs too.
I never said that introducing .MOBI levels of speculation in the new gTLDs would be a good thing. However in an early market, some level of speculation is a good thing as it drives awareness. This is currently an issue with a lof the new gTLDs – few people have heard of them and the benefits for small businesses switching from their existing ccTLD/COM brand websites to these new gTLDs are not high enough. Without that Mom and Pop business demographic, most of these new gTLDs will find it difficult to develop usage and awareness. Those registrations and websites are the ones that create value in a TLD. They kickstart development. Without development, a TLD quickly turns into a dead zone. Speculation without parallel development is toxic for a TLD.
So how do you think that the .MOBI registry should drive development and make the TLD healthier?
the game changed. i think .mobi is old news and its numbers or development has little to do with the brave new TLD world we’re entering… they were wanting to be a “mobile standard” and obviously with 1,000 TLD’s nothing is standard anymore.
“driving development” sounds like short term hype. reminds me of all the speculators who 90% claimed all their .mobi was “going to be developed” …hah, yeah right. just let it happen slow and naturally. there is no scenario where end-users would be lined up to register these things in massive 1,000,000 numbers right out of the gate. analyzing it too deeply at this point is like watching a group of people run in a marathon and trying to make sense of the first half mile of the race.
i think the idea of “hearing of a TLD and trusting it” is mostly over. it has to be… there is going to be 1,000 of them. you’re not going to be able to base your “trust” (aka familiarity) on a TLD.. dotINFO couldnt even get there, now we got a bazillion TLD’s so the idea that a handful of these will become “trusted” or “not trusted” (like the way people say YAY .web) is silly.
there is .COM and everything else. in the future, everything else is not a dirty bad thing, you will not be considered a “cheap knock off” for using .whatever… the TLD’s with the highest number of registrations may not end up being the “most recognized.” .ninja could become the most recognizable TLD with only 500 registrations and 2 developed websites.
unless of course, you are one of the people who are banking on the public becoming more confused as time goes by or are still hanging onto the idea that for a TLD to be “successful” it needs to have an arbitrary number of registrations or high level of development.
its a brand new TLD world… success (and failure) are going to come in many different shapes. 1 website could make .ninja the most recognizable and most popular new TLD.
so for example, what does that mean for .ninja “values”? nothing necessarily.
Native Apps have subsumed Mobile Phone Usage. 86% and rising. Points of entry/access, especially for the Youth market, is the App (installed), NOT the URL (e,g, Whisper app, not the URL: whisper.sh, Secret app, not the URL Secret.ly, SnapChat app, not the URL Snapchat.com) The URL serves more as a reference point (for media, investors, general info).
I used to have lots of .mobi (foolish me, NOT foolish .me – which turned out to be very wise for selling to end-users, creating apps, and even considerable parking revenues). I have maybe 5 .mobis left – and these are premium. I gave away many and let the others drop.
I do not believe the new .gTlds have sliced into the .mobi pie. A pie that got consumed by bad timing, poor decisions, gluttony and “pie in the sky” speculation.
@John McCormac:
“The health of a TLD is about more than simple registration volume…. As for being a “self appointed expert”, having run the only full .MOBI web usage and development survey that accurately classified the TLD’s usage and development and having tracked and mapped .MOBI over the years …. ”
OK, I would assume you have done similar studies on other TLDs.
Question: Outside of Country Codes, .Com and .Org, Do any other legacy TLDs show a “healthy” development pattern? My experience is that they all are parking lots. .Mobi had dozens of Fortune 500 companies building stand-alone websites on their domains. They had written endorsements and cash from Nokia, Google, Microsoft, TMobile, Visa and others. For a while it looked quite “healthy”. Then the music(.mobi) stopped.
Explaination for joke: .Mobi crashed on a badly run Sedo auction that managed to have two winners for many of the domains. Music.mobi was bid to over $600,000 in that auction, but an highly aggressive registry response to the double bids angered domainers on the extension. Money for advertising went instead to lawyers.
Mainly at country level markets level, Accent,
What appears at that level is that most of the development happens on the ccTLD/COM axis and the development level drops after that. The .BIZ gTLD is typically the lowest in terms of development. Many domain registrants with brand protection registrations in those TLDs don’t set the domain up in DNS, leave the registrar automatically park it on a PPC lander for undeveloped domains or point the domain to their developed .COM or ccTLD website. In terms of growth, many of those legacy TLDs tend to be relatively static with the drops being replaced by new domains. Some of this is due to the ‘must register’ model used on some registrar’s checkout page. So while someone is registering their .COM or .ccTLD, the option to also register the domain in NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO etc is presented as an option. However the combined PPC/Holding Pages percentage increases the farther away a TLD gets from the ccTLD/COM axis.