Martin Clancy, of dotMobi, responds to claims that money spent on specialist mobile URLs should be spent on bakery products.
We were interested to read the opinion piece published Wednesday 5th by doughnut-lover, Anne Thomas on the .mobi domain. Don’t get me wrong, we love doughnuts too, but we were left wondering just why she was getting so hot and bothered about .mobi and has seemingly confused top level domains with fried dough.
dotMobi simply offers a mobile choice to people – if you want to mark out a domain as specifically mobile, you can. We think that is a important choice to offer.
There are now well over a million active .mobi sites covering the world, in every vertical. Everything from Subway to Autotrader, Microsoft, to Playboy, to Budweiser to name but a few. And who knows, there could well be a mobile doughnut site in there somewhere.
If there isn’t, there should be.
And yes it is about a separate mobile experience – because a mobile experience should be designed with the mobile context in mind. Where and how you host that mobile experience is up to you.
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But there are other considerations too. Having your mobile content ranked high in search engine results is crucial to online success. One of the best ways to ensure good search engine results for your mobile site is the .mobi domain.
With Google recently announcing they will prioritise mobile friendly pages on their AdWords platform, the importance of having mobile-ready content has never been greater.
You don’t have to like any particular domain, but that’s why the marketplace offers choice. Nobody gets forced to buy the .mobi domain, in the same way as nobody is forced to buy a .com or a .info (or a doughnut for that matter). Obviously if you own a domain – any domain – and you don’t promote it, you can hardly expect to see masses of traffic on it.
The .mobi domain opened for registrations five years ago. Only five years ago when there was no iPhone. No Android. But, despite all these radical changes on the mobile front, .mobi as a domain has continued to grow. The .mobi domain was created to help make the mobile Web a viable endeavour.
Does the .mobi domain alone do that? No. The iPhone certainly helped. So did dozens of other convergent technologies and services. And it’s part of the reason the dotMobi company’s other products — primarily the goMobi site creator and DeviceAtlas mobile device database — have also been successful. Our mobiForge cross-platform developer forum now has more than 50,000 active members, and our mobiThinking forum continues to be a sourcebook of choice for marketers globally.
The crucial element is understanding the mobile user’s needs and serving them appropriate content. As long as this need exists, which it always will, there will be a need to easily find mobile content. This is the role of the .mobi domain as the only industry-backed, ICANN-approved designation for mobile Web content.
Now, where did I put that doughnut?
* Martin Clancy is marketing manager of dotMobi
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