Still not convinced that 2007 is "The Year of the Mobile Web"?
Any top-level domain is only as good as the sites that use it.
.mobi is no different. We're a very young domain registry, and we've made amazing progress with the domain uptake. But, like many registries, a large part of our mission is to stimulate the growth of content.
But what adds to dotMobi's responsibility in particular, I think, is an awareness that .mobi sites are, in a way, uniquely representative of a whole new medium: the mobile web.
That's certainly we take that responsibility very seriously. Our developer community, tools, publications and resources are all designed to help grow the mobile web. On mobiForge, we service many thousands of signed-up mobile developers and their needs every day, even those that are not (yet! :-) ) running their sites on .mobi domains.
As a result I feel fairly confident that our domain uptake, the numbers of live sites - not to mention the success of the mobiForge community itself - are valuable barometers for the sector as a whole.
So I thought I'd share some interesting statistics with you.
Just one of the things that we measure here at dotMobi is how .mobi sites are being picked up by search engines. That (at least in relative terms) shows us how fast content is going live, and how actively search providers' crawlers are indexing it.
You can tracking page index size on Google quite easily. The trick is the "site:" syntax, and the fact that the approximate number of matching pages is shown in the top right hand corner of the results. Enter "site:.mobi" into Google and you will see what I mean.
This is presented as a count of pages, not sites or domains. We've been recording this figure regularly for a selection of top-level domains since December. Although I have no way of knowing how accurate they are as absolute figures, they seem to be a fair measure of relative growth.
(Of course they fall sometimes too: presumably the removal of dead or poor sites from the index. But taking a ratcheted monthly peak accounts for that. The highest .mobi result count in July was just over 3 million pages.)
Anyway, normalise to December, plot the percentage growth for each top-level domain, and out comes...
Whoah! Well, I guess we were starting from a fairly low base... our top-level domain was only a few months old then. But nevertheless, the growth curve is astonishing. We have more than ten times as many pages being indexed today than we did back at the start of the year.
As proof of our confidence in this year's growth of the mobile web, and the .mobi domain in particular, this is fabulous.
Of course these figures aren't about us. They're all thanks to the hundreds of thousands of domain holders and site owners out there who are demonstrably living the mobile dream.
These individuals and organisations are already out there, realising the medium's opportunities, overcoming its challenges, and prototyping the future. Basically bootstrapping what is clearly now the web's inevitable evolution.
And, as you can see, they're doing it right now. Are you?
[ - this is a crosspost from our corporate blog at http://blog.mobi]
Posted by James Pearce 4 years 41 weeks ago
James Pearce was previously CTO at dotMobi and co-author of Wiley's "Mobile Internet for Dummies". He has the mobile web in his veins, having worked previously at Argogroup, AnywhereYouGo, and as founder of old-skool mobile blog, WAPtastic. James has declared every year since 1997 to be "the Year of the Mobile Web" - and is finally right. Right now, he's travelling the world and living the mobile dream.
Posted by vstan 4 years ago
Hi, Maybe this is not the right place to discuss about this subject but i find it vey important for the development and future of .mobi and would like to share this with members of this forum. The .mobi guidlines should be focused on PC and MOBILE conntent in the first stage (1-2 years) and only after that on MOBILE only content. The development of the .mobi websites, at least in the next few years, will depend more on the quantity of content and not on the quality of it. The same happend for the .com development. No matter what some are thinking, the quantity content is owned by medium and small web site, not by large company websites. Most all of the small and medium web site owners use one domain name instead two or many. They are not interested today to have a .com and a new .mobi website. The solution for them would be to offer them the possibility to move their old pc content, together with the new mobile content on one .mobi web site. And because for the moment the pc content is much more important, there should't be for the moment restrictions (1-2 years) to have pc content on the .mobi root. Mtld should let .mobi web site owners to use the domains with pc based content AND mobile content and to impose to use mobile content in the root only after 1-2 years when there will be enough mobile content uploaded by the medium and smal web sites. This rules should be official because today, what i say i a reality: over 95% of the .mobi domains host pc based content. So if i were in mtld's place, i would impose urgent a rule: you can host pc based content IF you also have mobile content. but i wouldn't limit the root for mobile content. This is the teory. In practice, all of you can check the .mobi websites indexed by Google and see that .mobi websites host pc based content. If you enter on these sites you will be amazed to find out that they neither have a mobile version. This is what i say. The first step for mtld should be to impose that these sites have a mobile version first and only in 1-3 years to deny mobile content in the root. An example of a good .mobi web site is the bahamas vacations travel website which has in the root the pc version and the mobile version is in the /mobi directory. It has a link on the index to the mobile version. Such a website, will easy move and change the root pc version with the mobile version. I think this is important and mtld should think and analize the suggestion. And not at least should think to the ppc systems because over 43% of the advertising revenues of google and yahoo are based on such schemes ...
Posted by Cyril 4 years ago
vstan >
"An example of a good .mobi web site is the bahamas vacations travel website"
I disagree: if I go with my Nokia and GPRS access to this bahamas site, I'll be realy disapointed to load (and be charged) a 259 KB page in order to have the link to the real mobile version.
It's ok to have PC and Mobile content on your .mobi site if at least you detect if it's a pc or mobile user. (And so my Nokia will not have to load the (slow and expensive) pc content first)
Posted by vstan 4 years ago
Sorry about the example. It is true, the example site needs a redirection. But the subject was not this specific web site. It was about .mobi's strategy. I posted a message to get opinions about the steps which mtld should take to have the .mobi process faster. Should they first ask mobile AND pc content, without to impose the mobile content in the root (and a redirection, cyril has right) or should they do as now? I said that to move faster, to impose today mobile content in the root is a mistake. Explanation was in the former message. I really would like some opinions. Best regards.
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