.Mobi Turns Five

Mobile domain reaches five year anniversary.

Five years ago yesterday .Mobi launched its landrush period, officially opening the doors to what would become a wild roller coaster for domain investors. Remember Flowers.mobi?

I quickly came full circle on .mobi. I remember meeting the .mobi team at DomainRoundtable in Seattle and thinking “Wow, this is a fresh domain extension that actually makes sense.”

But technology quickly caught up. Mobile web access became less “mobile specific” with the growing prevalence of smart phones.

In a blog post commemorating the anniversary, dotMobi acknowledges these changes but states .mobi continues to flourish:

But, despite all those radical changes on the mobile front, .mobi as a domain has continued to grow. There are now more than one million active registrations and .mobi is the sixth largest generic Top-Level Domain in the world (.com, .net..org. .info and .biz come ahead of it.) There are now two-character domains like nv.mobi and 53.mobi. There are now .mobi sites covering the world, in every vertical. (And in South Africa, “.mobi” is synonymous with “mobile website,” e.g., “Our product needs a .mobi built ahead of we launch.”)

I suspect a lot of fresh top level domains introduced in the coming years would love to have a million domain registrations.