OPINION: Lose your .mobi and buy doughnuts instead

We have never had any reason to use the .mobi suffix because we have always had a mobile friendly website, which I will talk about later.

Wapple has a deep understanding of mobile consumers and how they like to discover and engage with brands. We also knew that one day it would be as easy for them to access branded content on mobile as to make a phone call.

Five years ago businesses and brands were confused about the mobile web (or Wap as it used to be known) and didn't take it seriously. So perhaps the concept of a .mobi extension at that time reassured them that they could separate their mobile marketing from their 'serious' digital marketing activity.

Then between 2007 and 2009 our predictions about mobile web take-up became broadly true. Consumers, with their shiny new smartphones, had grasped the concept of consuming web content on mobile and very quickly mobile browsers were generating more than ten per cent of web traffic to brand websites.

This should have been fantastic news for the brands receiving this level of mobile traffic but sadly they were serving their ‘designed-for-PC’ websites with Flash components, large graphics and irrelevant content instead of a mobile optimised version.

No surprises that consumers became frustrated and adoption of the mobile web was slowed. Nobody likes a bad user experience and while customers continued to use mobile, their trust of those brands was damaged.

But now let's look at what's going on today.

Shockingly so many digital marketers appear as unconvinced/uneducated about mobile web as they were before, despite the volumes of mobile traffic that comes to their website url via mobile.

Only a few provide mobile-optimised content and many, strangely, operate a separate mobile site under a .mobi extension that receives next to no traffic, expecting their consumers to visit that as well as their main domain.

The fact is that the consumer can simply type ‘Coke’, ‘Nike’ and so on into their mobile search bar and are sent to the core web property (.com etc), not a .mobi site.

We live at http://wapple.net and that’s where both our web and mobile visitors can find us and we present mobile visitors with a location-based experience that is dynamically adapted to their situation and to their unique mobile device. Guys! If the party‘s at your house, don’t force your 'mobile' friends to go to your shed.

So on September 27th we took that £8 we would have spent on renewing our .mobi domain and bought doughnuts for everybody in the office, money much better spent. We suggest you do the same.