In my blog reading today I came across a post about recent domain name auctions in the .mobi top level domain. For those not familiar with this TLD, it was created in late September of 2006 to bring the mobile web to cell phones and other devices. I looked at getting winecast.mobi at the time but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
Fast forward 15 months and wine.mobi sells at auction for $30,000. Not bad for a few moments of work and several months. It remains to be seen what will come of this domain but this sale was enough for me to buy my .mobi domain today. What I’ll do with it is another story.
It’s pretty unclear to me what the use of this TLD is (disregarding the fact that I think restricting TLDs at all is a stupid money-grab: there’s no technical reason for it). I mean, the iPhone has a “.com” button, not a “.mobi” button. Why would you want to bury a site you expected to visit in a TLD most people don’t know exists? It’s not like there’s a magical Yahoo-style directory for the domain any more than there is for the long-extant TLDs.
Winecast.mobi? Better suited to .tv I think.
Tim – if i read you right and you sold that domain for $30k yourself, then very well done. Ultimately i think thats the entire use of the TLD’s these days. They are basically equivalent to a pyramid scheme with the end recipient losing.
Shoes.com vs Zappos
Books.com vs Amazon
Search.com vs Google
As the wise Gr says its not 1996 anymore – the days of Yahoo’s directory dominance is over.
Thanks for your comments everyone…
gr: I agree with your reasoning and this is why I didn’t buy wine.mobi or winecast.mobi when the TLD was opened. Not sure if that was the right call or not.
frank: someone already beat me to registering that domain. Not sure if I’d do any more work in video anyway but you never know.
Philip: No such luck with wine.mobi. Some other domain squatter got the $30k
There is already a viable site
http://www.Wines.mobi
which provides prices & rankings for 20,000+ diff bottles of wine.
You can actually walk into any wine store and instantly check on your cellphone what you’re buying.
And – it’s FREE!
I use
http://WineRank.com
and it has all the features of the mobi tld.