Mobi Market Meltdown

Yesterday’s Traffic Auction showed that what I had predicted has come true: the dot mobi market has melted down.

Here are the .mobi auction results:

mortgage.mobi – $18K
drugs.mobi – $17.5K
sales.mobi – $10.5K
men.mobi – $10K
films.mobi – $10K
escort.mobi – $10K
computers.mobi – $9.5K
airlines.mobi – $9.5K
records.mobi – $8.5K
boats.mobi – $6K
forsale.mobi – $5K
show.mobi – $5K
religion.mobi – $3K

Let me compare this with a sale most people will be familiar with: flowers.mobi – $200K. Can the mobi fanatics really say with a straight face that flowers.mobi is more than 10x better than mortgage.mobi, drugs.mobi and sales.mobi? Or could it be that the value of dot mobi’s is now about 1/10 of what it used to be in its heyday?

Heck, the total of all 13 dotMobi sales in this auction wasn’t even the $200K for flowers.mobi. Is flowers.mobi really better than all of these domains put together?

Here are some other interesting comparisons: mortgage.net sold in 2006 for $149K versus mortgage.mobi for $18K now. Sales.us sold in 2006 for $8K versus sales.mobi for $10.5K – yes, that’s right – .mobi is only doing slightly better than the anemic .us market was doing two years ago. Films.tv sold last year for $8,600 versus films.mobi for 10K now. Boats.org sold two years ago for $50,249 versus boats.mobi for $6K now. Forsale.org sold last year for $12K, forsale.biz sold in 2006 for $3,550, forsale.co.uk sold two years ago for $14,692 versus forsale.mobi for $5K. Show.org recently sold for $13K versus show.mobi for $5K.

There are two additional take home points from this. First, there will definitely be a cascade down effect because of this. If the top dot mobi’s are now struggling to sell at five figures versus the previous six-figure sales, good dotMobi’s that are not premium keywords will be stuck in low four figure and three figure sales, and a lot of the cheaper mobi’s the people bought will be worth only reg fee or perhaps a nod above that.

The second take home point is that if dot mobi has done so badly, most if not all, new extensions will do badly. The promotion of mobi domains was better than any other newly released extension and yet it has utterly collapsed. Dot asia investors – take heed!

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