The top 10 domain awards and yes .mobi really is that bad!

Domain AwardsI have taken a fair interest in domain names this year, possibly a bit late to the party so paying good amounts for the domains but many would say it is still early doors and certainly not too late to invest wisely for future profits, I have therefore kept an eye on the usual suspects blog wise when it comes to researching domain names and I have to say they are mostly a good read.

Unlike the billion ‘how to make money online’ blogs out there, the domainer blogs usually just tell a story or document what is happening without the need for self promotion, refreshing.

When looking at domain names I have to admit I have been a bit uncertain as to the worth of .net’s and also how the .co.uk is viewed from across the pond so I decided to send out some emails and ask exactly how the established and successful domainers view the industry and rank the top 10 extensions. I have to say I was (as I have been before) extremely grateful and bowled over by the responses from what I would class as the industries big players, I specifically looked for a mixture of domainers and SEO’s and targeted my top 10.

Responses came from Elliot Silver, DaveN, Patrick @ Blogstorm, Rand @ SEOmoz, Rob @ Hey, Frank Schilling, Donna Mahony, Aaron Wall and Michael Gilmour. It is a small sample but it’s a pretty good who’s who in domains and SEO I think you’ll agree.

Each respondent ranked the extensions from 1 to 10 and I have collated them and added up their total points to give us a pretty good indication of how they are viewed, so as voted for by the industry here are the top 10 domain extensions:

  • .com 100 points - a clear winner, no surprise
  • .net 82 points
  • .co.uk 75 points
  • .org 72 points
  • .de 61 points
  • .us 41 points
  • .info 40 points
  • .tv 30 points
  • .mobi 25 points
  • .idn 24 points

It is clear that collectively the group of people who responded think .mobi really is as crap as I has expected and reassuringly there is a lot of love for .net’s still and .co.uk is highly regarded along with the every popular German extension .de making them excellent country codes for investment.

I personally own a few .net‘s like Outdoor Furniture & Bedroom Furniture which I hope will come of age later next year - they have huge amounts of search traffic out there that’s for sure, if priced out of .com’s and .net’s this survey tells me to stick to country codes which will be solid investments.

.us looks like people believe it will be a good backfill for the .com, albeit a long term play
.info has done well to generate some better sales this year but gets no real love from our survey.

I’ll finish by quoting Frank who sums it up pretty well when he says;

Stick with logical search-term style names in .com/.net and the CCTld of the populous country you live in and you should always be able to resell your names and make a living.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. The thing about .mobi is that its long like .info and it wasn’t in the same price bracket as .info so why the heck would any one like it?

  2. Yesterday I saw the letter on Frank’s blog and I was wondering why you didn’t included the biz extension. I know it has a low market value but there are cases when it makes good sense like in a name I have PokerAffiliatePrograms.biz. And personally I like it much more than info or mobi. Plus there are a lot available so you can easily have a keyword match domain to develop and rank high.

  3. .Mobi may become popular in the future when mobile browsers improve user experience.

    For some reason I always think “spammer” when I see a .info domain link to me. It seems to hold that reputation.

    • When the browser improves there is less need for .mobi

      eg. iphone now… imagine it in 3-5 years time 🙂

    • I still don’t see the need for .mobi personally, users are often not appreciative of scaled down versions of sites, advanced users may like that but not the masses. we will see. info messed up with their cheap reg fee’s making them throw away domains and mass spammed with so I’d agree with you there.

  4. With regards to the overall results, a great response from some of the best in the world of domains, if these guys and gals don’t know then its not worth knowing when it comes to domains.

    as for the .mobi extension, as mobile browser technology develops further, the need for a seperate site i.e. on the .mobi exstension will no longer be a requirement.

    New gadgets are out there now that will view the standard web page as you want to see it and without having to put up with slow download times. Check out the Pocket Surfer 2 over at Firebox or Coolest-Gadgets.com post from back in September to see what I mean.

  5. I personally hate the .mobi TLD. I feel strongly that every popular site should have a mobile-ready interface, and not need a separate domain for it.

  6. Mind if I give you the dotMobi perspective on the mobile web and why .mobi matters?

    There are more than 80,000,000 .com / .net / .org sites but only 0.03% of those are mobile friendly.

    Yet there are four times as many mobile phones sold as PCs. 1.3 billion users can access the internet on their mobiles. That’s 36% more mobile web users than PC-based web users.

    Browser advances, high-end handsets and .com-based domains don’t address the mobile context. TVs, PCs and Mobile each address specific needs, have unique uses and different revenue streams. What may seem like a proliferation of high-end handsets actually represents a tiny fraction of the overall marketplace; the demand for mobile content is not going to wait for that penetration to happen. The .mobi domain is the one solution that addresses the needs of the “third screen.”

    Unlike m.domain.com, wap.domain.com, domain.com/m, etc., a .mobi address promises end users that a site will work on a mobile phone. That’s because dotMobi helps content providers make their sites adhere to enforceable technical standards.

    Some domain investors may not value .mobi, but a lot of brands do, including:

    American Automobile Association
    Amazon
    Amtrak
    AXA
    Bank of America
    Benetton
    BMW
    BusinessWeek
    CNN Money
    Diageo (Smirnoff.mobi)
    Disney
    E! Channel
    ESPN
    Ford
    Ferrari
    Fox News
    Hilton
    Intel
    Library of Congress
    Marriott
    Maxim (Magazine)
    NBA
    Paramount
    Ralph Lauren / Polo
    TBS (TV channel)
    The Sun
    Time (Magazine)
    USA Network
    Wachovia
    The Weather Channel
    Yahoo!
    ZAGAT

  7. I have been using the internet on my mobile device for the last 6-7 years without .mobi

    I expect bandwidth and devices to keep improving, and frankly mobi cannot have it both ways.

    To be fair if .mobi was there instead of WAP then there would have been a window of opperunity, however that has long gone.

    I want youtube, dynamic maps and fancy gizmos, not a 1999 WAP page.

    Obviously you will not agree, but all the arguements are out there already and end users are the one that count. You have listed a few, big corps that need to have fingers in every pie.

    How about a summary of how ‘investors’ ie. google - who rewrite pages, and say Vodafone, who er, rewrite pages for users as well are helping mobi?! 🙂

    I am sure you and others will make cash from the bandwagon, I just hope the new domainers are not burned as the industry does not need more bad publicity.

  8. Brian Stevens says:

    More people surf the net with their mobile phones - I, for one, like to know that when I go a site, it’s been customized for the mobile experience via .mobi, as opposed to “too much”, “nothing” or “too long to load” on one of the other extensions- eg, .com, .net —

    what other extension has been embraced by the biggest brands in such a short period of time? What other extension has created so much controversy in such a short time? What other extension has had sales in auctions (on the secondary market) in such a short period of time?

    what are some of the investors/partners? Nobody that big - just Google, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Nokia, Telecom Italia, Samsung, etc —

    Mobi is hot, but for it to really sizzle, it needs more development — when/if that happens, mobi will be a force —

    again, mobi will require wide development to succeed —

    but it’s surely one of the top 4 domains right now, based on brands, press, and sales —

    • To be brutally honest, I don’t think it will ever happen. Look at wap, it really never caught on that huge. I think the real value and thrust will be in larger, existing sites, creating mobile-friendly versions, and the iPhone will be the driving force behind that.

Leave a Reply