I recently came back from the ICANN meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. During the course of three days, we met with no fewer than 25 different registrars.
Many of you who are familiar with this channel know that the term "registrar" nowadays is an oft-used term that doesn't capture the real business model of the many enterprising companies who are "ICANN accredited registrars." Many of those we talked to would consider themselves web hosting providers that enable businesses large and small to develop an identity and a footprint by providing hosting, site creation, certs, e-commerce platforms, and yes an identity in the form of a Top Level Domain (TLD) or a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) to base it on.
For these companies, a domain is often the commodity piece in the range of offerings. The real margins are in the "value adds" like certs, e-commerce tools, and hosting. That said, the industry as a whole is looking for ways to differentiate itself, given that the whole context or presumption behind all of the services they provide is PC tailored content and access.
Now, let's look at mobile hosting: The average size of site done for mobile (if done right) is a fraction of the size of a site created to be accessed via PC. It doesn't require a different set of hardware, so no new investment. The tough part is to create the sites so it works well and rates at least a 4 out of 5 on the Mobile ready Report. That problem we have solved by offering the dotMobi Site Builder free of use!
Now, let's take a look at what's happening on the "content" side. Recall the rallying cry in the late nineties "Content is king." Well everyone seems to have heard that call. Everyone it seems is a content publisher; witness the rise of blogs (such as this one) and individuals who self-publish.
The new rallying cry ought to be "it's not about content, its about distribution." Namely, "How do you take all the content that is now vying for our attention, and build a new more targeted and expanded distribution channel?" With mobiles outstripping PCs four to one, and Internet access always-on and available to many of these devices, mobile is the new distribution channel.
So why do I go to great lengths to lay out the arguments above? Because the "aha! moment", as one of my colleagues calls it, is when people see they are able to use .mobi and all the openly available tools and resources to offer a new distribution channel to their customers. (And BTW build a differentiated and profitable business for themselves.)
They also know that if they do not provide the tools and the means for businesses to establish a mobile distribution channel, someone else will.
No revelation here, as that is exactly how they themselves got started in the early days of the Web, and provided services to large and small businesses where the established telcos were too slow or encumbered to offer their toll-free and yellow-pages services for the then-new distribution channel... the Internet.
