Success at T.R.A.F.F.I.C!

For anyone wondering how we fared at the live Traffic/Moniker auction in Miami last Friday - we did great! We sold all of our 10 names and made a total of $596,000 - not bad for an afternoon's work! The results are as below:

poker.mobi - $150,000
ringtones.mobi - $145,000
news.mobi - $110,000
shopping.mobi - $55,000
email.mobi - $50,000
buy.mobi - $32,500
podcast.mobi - $25,000
cash.mobi - $12,500
pda.mobi - $8,000
zipcodes.mobi - $8,000

This revenue will be ploughed back into dotMobi (sadly, it did not fund my weekend in South Beach!) and will be put to good use as we work towards some new product launches scheduled for the end of the year. We will also be monitoring the development of these domains and look forward to seeing some exciting new content.

The T.R.A.F.F.I.C conference itself was a good opportunity to hear from some folks that have invested a lot in .mobi, some of whom are now developing their domains to realise their potential even further. During the lunch session right before the auction, my colleague Pinky Brand spoke about issues such as the introduction of the i-phone and dotMobi's thoughts on the matter (previously addressed by James Pearce on this blog), the future of mobile and some of our projects such as the City Names programme which offers enterprising developers an opportunity to partner with local governments in the roll out of city domains (this last idea struck a chord with quite a few people).

We are now awaiting the results of the remaining 35 names which are being sold via the silent auction currently ongoing and closing on Thursday.

Next stop - Sedo auction on 31st October!

Comments

[nbk]

The Social Web / Internet 2.0 development has created a huge surge of demand for unique, personalised destinations on the web - doubling the number of registered names to almost 140 Million in just 2.5 years between beginning of 2005 and Mid 2007, whereas it took almost 22 years to build the first 70 Million since the DNS was invented by Paul Mockapetris in 1983.

The greatest news for dotMobi is that the social web starts to fully embrace mobile, and that many more than ALL today’s existing destinations together will be created in great variety of the user generated content within the long tail.

To all brand managers out there: dotMobi is THE ONE fantastic single opportunity to establish a brand by ONE single shot on a truly global scale and in a globally unique way.

Because dotMobi is - from a branding perspective - in a beautifully way "clean": Unlike ANY other domain it conveys no regional connotations nor political nor ethical presumptions.

It is totally independent from any generic domain, because its core connotation "mobility" is itself fully orthogonal to anything else.

As such, dotMobi is poised to be the only domain that can take full advantage of the huge growth of the next wave of users connecting to the internet for the first time. Those are in the emerging economies and foremost connect via mobile because that’s the first thing with a CPU they will start to own and use.

Others will be those in the established western industry nations: Immediately after a critical mass of devices has a reasonably well working browser and a critical mass of mainstream services are designed to embrace mobile fixed mobile conversion will kick in in large numbers and dotMobi fits perfectly into this scenario as well.

The encouragement of dotMobi's rising market and marketing value by acheiveing UDS 400tsd for just three dotMobi premium names sold is on one hand encouraging, on the hand however still undervalued - even when this was a new record for dotMobi in this year for such a small number of names.

Considered that using a dotMobi name literally removes the need to register a country code name in each local country market and STILL have a globally working name, dotMobi give the winners of the auction all the ever will need.

The global mobile internet audience by one single universal address: That truly IS customer level simplicity at its best - it will successfully compete and win in this market!

In this light we should congratulations to the auction winners http://poker.mobi, http://ringtones.mobi and http://news.mobi are three extremely attractive destinations any as dotMobi they have "the bigger bang" for the buck compared to the same name in ANY dot-pick-one-of-your-choice namespace else - in the long run.

I am looking forward to see the proceeds getting re-invested in further anchoring mobile awareness and mobile device support in the so called "long tail", so that even site owners without deep technical expertise can soon start to create fully device adaptive content and sites - so we can finally overcome one of the biggest hurdles that has kept site designers to mostly design their internet sites with a target of desktop use in mind.

Thus form today’s perspective, creating a Desktop only targeted site means the design is already "legacy" on its first day live.

We must really get more folks to understand that the need to start designing for the future now, as legacy designs will have no chance to survive against the creativity of those new folks who start out on the great new green field on mobile.

These folks are not brainwashed by many years of day-to-day desktop experience as we are. It would be very strange if they gave the same old answers that most of us give when asked what a great mobile experience would be...

In this case, I am really looking forward to the day when they start saying: Move over, Grandpa... :-)

[Michael Rotkin]

Good job selling those domains. Whoever gets the domains has a huge opportunity, as .Mobi is the future of cell phone search and will one day be the sole means of daily internet users on the go".
Mark these words.

Michael Rotkin
Seo Specialist /Usability Expert
www.SeoChampion.com

[Matthew Nelson]

moreeeeeeeee blogging please. ;)

lets hear some talk about the upcoming premium auction. (which of course will go towards an all-expense-paid trip to disney world for the entire mTLD team, right?)

[oto kiralama]

very very nice topic :) (F)

[Rob Taylor]

Hi,

Does .mobi operate an open accounting policy?

ie. will this benefit from the auctions and the spending of the funds raised be published in an open manner?

Cheers,
Rob.

[Caroline Greer]

Rob,

dotMobi is a private company and does publish its accounts as per company law requirements. However, you would not see that level of detail in our company accounts.