In an email sent out today, Moniker.com has announced a re-auctioning of a batch of .mobi domains purchased recently from the TRAFFIC domain auction in Florida. The domains have now been placed back on the market by the winning bidder.
Note: I was not a .mobi buyer or bidder.
The buyer/bidder of these .mobi names at TRAFFIC wants to sell the domains at cost due to other financial obligations. Here is a list of the premium names sold at TRAFFIC to one bidder that now wants to sell them for cost .
Since you were a .mobi buyer/bidder in our most recent Traffic auction I am sending this email in regard to the .mobi names. We are giving you first shot at them but we need you commitment at of above the prices below.
These are available for purchase (on a first come -first serve basis) at these prices below thru this Friday November 9th.
Domain Venue Price
News.mobi Live $110,000.00
Shopping.mobi Live $55,000.00
ZIPCodes.mobi Live $8,000.00
elections.mobi Silent $3,000.00
jewelry.mobi Silent $15,730.00
move.mobi Silent $3,000.00
price.mobi Silent $3,993.00
weightloss.mobi Silent $3,000.00Will we see others follow suit and sell, first at cost, and later at loss? .Mobi is a true case-study of crowd mentality. There were three domain heavyweights in the first auction (Rick Schwartz, Anything.com’s Larry Fischer and partners, and Webmagic founder Greg McLemore) that set the tone for many speculators to follow. The speculators thought the three knew something more then others (hack, some between the three thought the same on each other as well) and all hell broke loose.
The only one who I believe knew what he was doing, in my humble opinion, is Rick Schwartz. Rick knew very well his purchase was a long shot and took his chances, but it wasn’t as much based on .Mobi as it was circumstantial. The rest of the story about this I cannot disclose, but maybe Rick will one day, maybe he won’t.
In the final analysis, based on all I know, .Mobi = Total speculation. Highly unrecommended as a domain investment vehicle.
Update: From a reliable source, majority of domains above are now (as of 8AM East., Nov. 8th) sold.
Adam Strong writes:
I’m sure Google’s announcement of “Android” (Mobile Phone Operating System) may have something to do with it as well.
Perhaps the typical model of parking and PPC does not work in a TLD like .mobi mTLD. The parking and PPC model of .com/net/org/biz/info/cctld is flat - the sites share the same media rich html environment. And it is a large webscape of tens of millions of websites. However .mobi is still a comparatively small webscape and only 720K or so .mobi domains are registered. There is a significant difference between the screen area of a mobile device and that of a desktop. The other flaw could be that type in traffic on an extension with such a small web footprint is going to be low.
As an extension, .mobi is going to take a few years to develop. However a lot of the speculation at the moment seems to be based on applying .com rules to a new extension. It is still in its pre-Landrush Anniversary Dump phase.
Is it really impossible to believe that it could be an ACTUAL family/personal issue that is preventing this person from keeping these names? Maybe they had a partner who backed out? Maybe they were not clear on the development requirements? Maybe they have had their bank accounts seized by the IRS?
It could be any number of possible reasons, but alas.. the naysayer majority all flow back to the “.mobi is a bad extension to invest in’ statements.
So, when the Cowboys returned cowboys.com last month, was it because .com is a bad extention to invest in, or was it for some other reason?
Over 550k .mobi names are registered in just over a year and thousands of reserved names are to be sold via this same auction platform. Eight names are bought and sold extremely fast for whatever reason the purchaser has”ฆ which is really none of our business.. and suddenly the sky is falling on the .mobi extension.
Anyone who manages to talk others out of investing in .mobi, helps the rest of us find and register great .mobi names. Keep it up.
This was posted by Monte on another board.
http://www.domainstate.com/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=83941&pagenumber=3
“to relieve all the speculation and rumor, the reason for the reach out on these is because the buyer is an investor group out of Sri Lanka. Although I have dealt with them before, there was an increased delay in having funds released from their bank (or from any bank from that country for that matter) due to increased security and terrorist funding investigations.
we do not take any chances and do not want to delay the transactions any longer than what is considered normal processing procedures so the buyer agreed to accept at cost resales while we have the names in escrow or as they were in process.
All but 4 names have now been resold at the auction reserves, preserving the integrity of the domain values and the process. We have lined up back ups and do line up back ups in case of adverse situations and it helped in this case and kept the industry’s reputation in tact.
that was the key initiative of this particular group of names. Hopefully you all can appreciate that no one wants any failed transactions from these types of sales. Its good for each and every one of you not to have a sale go bad and these will not go bad due to our efforts.”?
Sahar,
According to Moniker CEO, Monte Cahn, those 6 Premium .mobi domains abandoned by that one investor have been quickly bought up by other domain investors.
If .mobi is so terrible Sahar, why is ESPN marketing ESPN.mobi?
Why is the largest U.S. bank, Bank of America advertising BOFA.mobi?
Why is Disney advertising their High School Musical brand around the world using HSM2.mobi?
Why is Skype & Three marketing 3Skype.mobi?
Why is Ford marketing .mobi?
Why are thousands and thousands of BIG and small brands launching and marketing dotMobi sites?
Why did the founders of .mobi hire the Edelman Agency, the most prestigious Madison-Avenue Advertising Agency in the world to advance the dotMobi namespace? (BTW- their clients include UPS, Microsoft, GE, Samsung, MySpace, and many others)
Why have we seen several $xx,xxx and $xxx,xxx dotMobi sales occur within the last year.
Because of the .mobi global reach, I’ve been increasingly experiencing a good amount of type-in traffic.
Sahar, dotMobi is only 14 months old.
How old is .com, .net, .org?? 15-20 years old!
Why is Google promoting .mobi on Google.com?
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=72462
Sahar, dotcom is king, BUT dotMobi is increasingly becoming the most successful, accomplished extension to emerge since dotcom
With Respect,
-Anthony
Greg from webmagic has been dumping his .mobi names, some of them for quite a loss.
As Jay Westerdal points out in his blog, the claim that these domains were bought by a single investor is a fabrication. Where there’s smoke…
It seems Jay was not exactly being honest.
From Rick’s blog:
http://www.ricksblog.com/my_weblog/2007/11/mobi-sunday-foo.html
“Did you bid and win shopping.mobi yes or no ?
Did you then back out of the purchase, yes or no ?
It is important to clear the air. Jay’s blog has raised very damaging accusations to say the least. If you want to make such bold statements on ” why ” there is a mobi market it is crucial to not look as though you are fixing it!
RS….Even tho the above question was poised by some anonymous poster it is a good question and needs to be answered. I did not win shopping.mobi so the answer is NO and Jay must have made it up becuause it is an outright LIE on HIS part and I expect an apology and a retraction. A BIG apology and LONG retraction explaining this incident considering he circulated to 10,000 of my peers and now showing up on the industry boards. I hope folks on those board will post a link so the record can be set straight.
I did not win shopping.mobi so there was nothing to back out of,. This is very damaging to me and Jay should know better than to LIE. People should now begin to question HIS motives. I expect YOU and others to go back and have Jay explain his made up tales. Then you should ask other questions of why he was motivated to do this without verifying with ME? If you have ANY backbone you will.
Jay spread this lie to 10,000 industry professionals accusing me of backing out of a deal and casting shadows on Me, Moniker and the TRAFFIC Conferences. It was done with the worst of motives and fair minded people will see that. He was able to email me TWICE the day before asking for access to my private forum, but when I told him no and the reason, Jay did not have enough CLASS to email me and ask me directly about this. Instead he CHOSE to drag my good name, Moniker and TRAFFIC thru the mud with info that was not factual and done by a person that has a motive to hurt his competition. A motive to hurt Moniker. A motive to hurt TRAFFIC. A motive to hurt Rick Schwartz. The post by Jay yesterday that I learned about shortly after I made this initial post this morning is an outright LIE and is not factual. Backing out of a deal is one of the worst violations anyone in this community can make. Even when the TRUTH comes out and Jay is forced to apologize, there will always be those that will keep spreading the lie. So how do I EVER fix that? THANKS JAY!”
Some of you people are playing with fire here. Risking fellow professionals’ reputations to try and make a few points on some ‘I am a bigger and better domainer than you are’ contest.
From my experience in domains over the past 7 years, Rick has been the ONLY consistent no-BS domainer. He does not tell lies, make stuff up or even care how many people agree or disagree with him. He is honest to the point of aggrivating some people who think they are higher in domain-ranks, but I beg to differ.. Rick is the only stead-fast honest and realistic domain profesional I have ever run across to date.
Agree or not, he did not deserve this slap from Jay.
@Sean - Jay’s now retracted that claim, the evidence doesn’t support his post.
—-ANSWER—-
Noted, posted about it as well. Thanks.
Sahar
I see ‘Dave’ above claims that I’ve been ‘dumping… .mobi names, some of them for quite a loss’ but as is common on tne Internet, don’t believe everything you read.
His comment should have read “…selling a number of .mobi names, some of them for quite a profit…” My private transactions have all been profitable, as have my public ones (ie: mortgages.mobi $25k)
There are a good number of .mobi domains that I’m not selling.
Over the last 11 years, I’ve divested off a number of .com, .org, .net, and now .mobi domains. The names I’ve gotten rid of just don’t fit my particular business plans moving forward. I’ve always been an atypical domainer in that I’m not interested in keeping domains around just because I could. Instead I keep just select names I’m building businesses on, usually names that are amongst the most impressive single word dictionary domains around.