Mobile data usage is booming, but the rising tide has not lifted all boats. mTLD Top-Level Domain Ltd., the Irish company that sponsored the .mobi domain name, has been sold to Afilias, an Ireland-based provider of internet infrastructure services that has been administering the .info TLD.
Afilias says it intends to continue running dotMobi, the commercial operating name for mTLD, as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Financial records for mTLD filed at Ireland’s Companies Registration Office indicated that in 2009 mTLD had a loss of €3.5 million on a turnover of €6.4 million, compared to a loss of €324,000 the year before on turnover of €9 million. Total assets less liabilities (eg money owed to creditors) in 2009 was €1.7 million.
Although the .mobi domain name has been around since 2006, it hasn’t gained much momentum. Afilias says there are around one million registered .mobi domains, compared to the 187 million that have been registered to date across the internet as a whole. (The latter number comes from the VeriSign Domain Name Report published in December 2009.) Active .mobi sites may have been significantly lower.
Although a separate domain name for mobile sites might have seemed like a good idea to Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and the other big-name companies that were behind dotMobi in its early days, clearly things have played out much more differently than expected: Many internet sites—when they even bother to create specific mobile versions of their pages—simply use their regular domains. And apps and other widget-based services have made direct links that render even those .com URLs a little unfashionable.
Afilias had also provided admin services around the .mobi TLD since it was first launched. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.