Mobile Internet Opportunity No. 1

If you were to go 10 years back in time and have the knowledge that you have now, what would you do? First I would buy every decent 3 and 4 letter domain name under the sun. I would set up a social network, a clean cut search engine and maybe dabble a bit in online video sharing. It would be safe to say I would be doing extremely well for myself right now and anyone within a 3km radius.

Isn’t hindsight a great thing? Think about the opportunities!! If only you knew. Well in a way you do. Maybe not on a PC online level but even better than that, the next big thing. Mobile. I have said this before and will continue to say it, Mobile is the next frontier. Growth is massive and the opportunities available are in abundance.

Enough of the mobile praising and let’s get to business. Mobile business opportunity No. 1 – Domain Names. Domain names are extremely important for such things as branding and generating traffic (among a host of others). We also know that the domain name trade is a massive industry with many companies specialising purely in the buying and selling domain names.  Yet entrepreneurs have seemingly neglected jumping on the mobile domain name bandwagon. Since 2006, mobile has been given it’s own mobile friendly domain known as .mobi.

Currently a good .mobi domain sells for anywhere between $1000 – $3500 all the way up to $20,000. Although this doesn’t yet compete with the value of a traditional .com, this is quite significant as .mobi has only been around for the better part of 2 years. With mobile internet growth exceeding online internet growth by 8 times what will these .mobi domains be worth in a year? 3 yrs? 10 yrs?

Interestingly there are still plenty of 4 letter .mobi domains which can be bought for around $11-$15. If you buy now and sell a year later at $5000 that’s a decent investment. Buy up 5-10 of these then there is definite potential.

There are a couple of small catches though. Whether these domains will be as valuable as .com remains to be seen however I very much doubt it. Currently a premium .com domain would sell for almost 15x-20x as much as a .mobi. Even 5-6 years down the track I don’t think their value would be level with .com but expect great margins nevertheless, probably around the area of 40-50% of a premium .com domain. Considering a premium domain may cost upwards of $500,000 (check out Sedo selling results.com for $500k!) that’s not too bad. Some interesting reading regarding the value of some of the top domains can be found at the New Affiliate Resource blog.

The other catch is the problem of cyber-squatting. Before you go out and buy the best domain names you need to be wary of IP and trademarks which would most likely be owned by online based businesses. For example going out and buying twitter.mobi or Myspace.mobi wouldn’t be appreciated by the Twitter or Myspace people and you may expect a elegantly presented legal letter and a battle you don’t necessarily want to be apart of. This is something you must be aware of before going and investing in a good .mobi.

For reference here is some more info regarding domain name parking. Keep domains generic using highly trafficked search words with little characters as possible and your onto something big. So what what will you be thinking in 10 years time?