A review of auctions won at first .mobi domain auction shows most are out of compliance.
When mTLD, the registry for .mobi domains, hooked up with Sedo to auction off premium domains, they probably had no idea how successful it would be. Successful, that is, in terms of sales prices. But there’s another side of the coin, and that is compliance with mTLD’s auction rules.
Participants in the auctions are bound by several rules, including:
The Website may initially consist of a dotMobi-compliant parking page; provided, however, that You agree to:
– Use Your best efforts to create, launch, and operate a live website related to and primarily containing content relevant to the commonly held and widely shared understanding of the meaning of the Domain Name to replace the parking page within six (6) months of the transfer of the Authorization Code by mTLD.
– Achieve and maintain a mobile readiness score of at least 4, as measured by the ready.mobi test then available at http://ready.mobi/.
When the winner* of the over $1M of domains at the most recent auction said he bought them solely for resale, it struck me as against the spirit of the auction. I went back and reviewed the top 25 sales of the first Sedo .mobi auction (held over 2 months ago) and found that only 4 of the domains were compliant. Below is a list of the 25 domains and how they resolve as of Tuesday afternoon:
Hosting.mobi does not resolve
Bank.mobi does not resolve
Download.mobi does not resolve
Currency.mobi does not resolve
Insurance.mobi does not resolve
Chat.mobi Prompts me to download chat.mobi
Traffic.mobi Prompts me to download traffic.mobi
Books.mobi Prompts me to download books.mobi
Free.mobi goes to network solutions parking page
Loans.mobi compliant parking page
Marketing.mobi does not resolve
Creditcard.mobi does not resolve
Rent.mobi compliant parking page
Creditcards.mobi does not resolve
Voip.mobi forwards to VOIPgate.com
Webcam.mobi does not resolve
DomainName.mobi does not resolve
DomainNames.mobi forwards to EUROdns.com
Advertising.mobi parked page
Downloads.mobi non-mobi compliant web page
Credit.mobi compliant parking page
Atm.mobi non-mobi compliant web page
Payment.mobi non-mobi compliant web page
Index.mobi non-mobi compliant web page
Cricket.mobi compliant parking page
Reselling a domain doesn’t absolve the original buyer of the requirements. They must make the buyer enter into the same agreement with mTLD.
The big question: will mTLD enforce the rules, or will they just count their cash?
*The auction has been voided and will be rerun in January.
David J Castello says
Article published today about Sedo’s position on .mobi: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/Mobi-A-Safe-Real-Estate-Bet-60741.html
mb says
Last time I checked it is Dec. The transfer of names is just going through and we are no where near 6mths removed from the sales so why don’t we hold off a bit on these types of remarks. P.S. your inability to spell compliant (as opposed to complaint which is what you seem to have) makes your article look absolutely silly.
Andrew says
mb, this has nothing to do with the 6 month requirement. The domains should already have a compliant parking page per the requirements.
p.s. thanks for pointing out my minor typo of compliant. Clearly I’m able to spell it correctly since it was right in the title.
Andrew says
Thanks for the link David. It looks like he wrote that article before the music.mobi and games.mobi auctions were voided.
I still think .mobi is risky. Although more and more people will use mobile phones to access the internet, the activities they perform will be limited until browsing on a phone becomes as convenient as doing it on a desktop. At that point, won’t browser be compatible with most .com sites?
Another funny thing…Matt’s article has an ad link in it to “Premium Domain Names”. It’s a link to competitor BuyDomains 🙂
Steve M. says
It’ll be surprising indeed if the mTLD folks even try to enforce their “use” requirements on anyone…
While the use rules are admirable on their face for trying to insure the domains are placed into actual (ie non-parking) use, the odds that any of the .mobi buyers would allow mTLD to take their non-compliant domains back–much less without full refunds–are about zero.
The lawsuits that such attempts would immediately generate would likely bankrupt mTLD (just try getting agreement on what their terms “best efforts,” “related to,” “primarily containing,” etc means); which would do no one any good.
As a result, here’s what the future of .mobi will look like in the years to come:
#1. A few–less than 25%–will have actual, usable, mobile-type/compliant content as part of being run like the real businesses they were intended for.
#2. The other 75% will either not resolve or have PPC/ Adsense/ CPA ads on them; as their owners wait (pray) for others to pay them even more than they (mostly over)paid for them the first time around.
.mobi? DOA. RIP.