.mobi for All
By: Eric Reyes
The mobile-friendly top-level domain wants you to get busy building those mobile-only landing pages, but will anybody come?
Neil Michel bought .mobi top-level domains as soon as they were available without consulting
his bosses. As eMedia Director of Prosper magazine in Sacramento, Calif., he saw it as his duty to claim ownership of the mobile domain names before
anyone else could capitalize on the company's brand name. He managed to snag ProsperMag.mobi and ProsperMagazine.mobi but not Prosper.mobi.
"At the time I registered them, no one knew .mobi existed," Michel said. "I just did it and told [my bosses]
we did." The .mobi names went on sale on September
26, 2006, but only recently has awareness of the top-level domains become more pervasive. But even as the domains are being registered, there is
still some doubt about their relevancy in an iPhone world where the full Web-browsing experience is finally coming to the cell phone.
The .mobi (also known as dotMobi) company is the informal name of the mTLD Top Level Domain firm appointed
and approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and is backed by mobile operators, Internet companies and device
makers with investment by companies such as Ericsson,
Google, GSM Association, Hutchison, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung, Syniverse, T-Mobile,
Telefónica Móviles, TIM, Visa and Vodaphone.
While the idea for .mobi domains was a Nokia brainstorm
that dates back to 2000, it wasn't until March 2004 that 10 companies signed on to a .mobi consortium.
In July 2005, ICANN approved the top-level domain and in May 2006, select big brand companies were invited to buy their domains before this was open
to the general public.
A typical .mobi website is supposed to be formatted for easy display on a mobile
phone. That means, in most cases, simple text, few if any graphics and content that is
in an easy-to-read summary form. Ads can be placed in a .mobi environment – sometimes
as a page before the content, sometimes placed between pages of content. More
image-friendly banner ads for .mobi can be employed, as advertisers CNET, The Disney
Channel, Zagat and the wildly popular "High School Musical" have done.
Michel says that buying the domains is "nothing – developing it is another story."
And that seems to be the hang-up right now with the .mobi explosion. While around
700,000 .mobi names have been registered so far, people like Michel are developing
them for a very slow rollout. In the case of Prosper magazine, the publication in the
last year redesigned its print magazine and its website and went through a hiring spurt
before they could even think about their .mobi properties.
Finding Mobile Footing
Their .mobi dilemma is a case study in grappling with a .mobi strategy that fits in
with a company's overall business plan and vision of what they want to deliver to
their customers versus what can be monetized over .mobi. "The game is changing
under our feet," Michel says, "because of the new more realistic browser experiences
coming from the iPhone and others like it." He wonders if the iPhone will
allow them to do something in a more traditional Web browser environment, or if
it would be better to cater to the 200 million handsets in America that may have
limited browser capabilities.
Since Prosper is a regional magazine aimed at the Sacramento Valley area at large,
Michel wonders what will be valuable to that audience in a mobile environment. It
won't be a 2,000-word article, he says. Plus, Prosper's main website has a lot of video on
it. "In a handheld, the video is a joke," he says. "We can't put our video into the .mobi
domain." In terms of mobile advertising, they are focusing on the mobile ad banner for
now. "Until advertisers themselves have a .mobi strategy, we don't have anything."
Some mobile commerce networks are glad .mobi is around but don't see a huge impact
on their business yet. Dan Wright, CEO of mobile commerce portal mPoria, sees
visibility gaining. "If the retailer sees value in .mobi and the customers do, then it does
impact our business," Wright says. He adds that "a good portion of our merchants are
using .mobi. If they ask us if they should use it, we say it certainly is good to have. At
least you can be found on mobile."
Wright says that right now mPoria
powers m-commerce sites on the mobile
Web to help them sell their stuff.
They provide the front end and the back
end and the hosting for the sites. Medio
is their mobile advertising partner.
Wright says mPoria has seen 300 percent
growth quarter-over-quarter using
their current model, and that if .mobi
helps their merchants' marketing, "then
that's good for us."
On the software side, some companies
are still trying to decide what the mobile
customer prefers. GoWare, makers of
custom software for mobile publishers,
perceives a disconnect. Jason Thibeault,
CTO and co-founder of GoWare, says
that "among mobile software providers
that are dedicated to the mobile Web,
there is a big disconnect. There are a lot
of different Webs right now. The desktop
user is very comfortable but the mobile
Web user wants quick, efficient access
[to content]."
He says that while .mobi is still in
its infancy, GoWare is doing its best
to integrate coupons and ads into a
.mobi platform. "We are getting the
targeted marketing messages to your
mobile phone," he notes. Yahoo, he
says, is just serving banner ads. He
wonders, who wants a banner ad in
a .mobi environment? Thibeault believes
.mobi is not visible enough
right now. "The content sites are
not sure they want to commit the research
– not to the .mobi bandwagon
right now." He says he knows a lot of
sites that are using their main top-level
domain to serve up their mobile
websites and not conforming to the
simplicity of presentation the .mobi
Web would seem to promise.
The folks at .mobi itself are proactive
in their quest to put a spotlight on the
possibilities of the domain. James Pearce,
VP of technology at .mobi, thinks that
as far as Web relevance, .mobi prevails
even now. Continued on Page 2...
Tags:
mobile marketing, .mobi, domains,
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