Major companies launching dot-Mobi sites or Is it just a fluke?

Ever since its launch, .mobi domain extension has seen people arguing about its merits with an almost insane passion. Dot-Mobi registrants and website owners always argued that it has a special place for mobile web among the jungle of domain TLDs out there, while others argued that mobi is not even needed when devices are getting better all the time and will eventually access full websites without any problems.

Both sides gave tons of arguments to dominate the other side and occasionally things even got hot at domain forums. I won’t go in to the details of what arguments both sides made for and against dot-mobi extensions (I promise I will make a post about that in near future), but one of the main complaint has always been that how come there are not many big well known comapnies using their dot-mobi domains?

Well, it looks like that perception may change in the near future. We all know that there are tons of sites developed using mobi domains and 100s of those sites are also well known sites.

But most recently there has been few mega mobi sites launched that are at least giving a pause to this argument. These major brands recently launched their mobi websites:

- Weather.mobi

- CNNMoney.mobi

- Visa.mobi

Now those are no mini sites….they are as major as they get……absolutely mega brands and well known companies. Not only is Visa a backer of the mobi-TLD, but Visa has also put their money where their mouth is.

Just imagine masses of people going to visa.mobi and what would that do to the public perception and confidence about using .mobi

Now imagine people getting their financial information from CNNMoney.mobi? How is that for creating good publicity for the mobi domains?

Then just imagine millions of people checking weather at Weather.mobi? Now that will certainly raise awareness about what dot-mobi is.

We all know that at the end of the day, any company or product is just as good as its perception? Japanese make good cars but they also make bad cars, but their perception is good so many people just go buy Japanese cars.

If mTLD can keep working hard to get big companies and brands like the above ones launch their mobi-sites, it will definitely bring dot-mobi domains to the main stream. It will create a better perception of dot-mobi extension and people will get used to visiting mobi sites and developers will develop more mobi sites. At the end, it won’t matter why dot-Mobi was originally launched. What will matter is that people will just think dot-Mobi sites are for mobile web. Dot-Mobi and Mobile web will become same just like coke and pop are synonymous.

Its all about creating awareness, changing perceptions, and making it happen.

Dot-Mobi is not where it is supposed to be….. its just in its infant stage and mTLD must keep nurturing it to bring it to its full potential.

That said, I am getting ready for the debate again