Does Anyone Actually Use Their .mobi ?

[RedBar]

Today I let my remaining three .mobi names go, one of them our company name which has for the past couple of years simply pointed at our .com site.

I see from jmccormac's site that .mobi is definitely trending downwards, does anyone use them at all or are they mostly registered purely for "company protection" purposes?

[ronin]

I have an online brand with an international audience. I've always aspired to publish content in several languages apart from English and in the next year or two I might actually achieve that goal.

Quite a while back - when the first iPad was released and a swathe of Android smartphones were just arriving in the shops, I decided that touch-based, handheld devices were probably going to become mainstream and that I wanted to build a touch-optimised, light-on-editorial interface to complement my editorial-heavy main website - for people who preferred to swipe and tap rather than sit down with a cup of coffee and read at length.

My first thought was to host this touch-optimised interface at:

m.mybrand.com/

My second thought was that, it would mean that my touch-optimised non-English content would have to be hosted at

m.mybrand.com/fr/
m.mybrand.com/de/
m.mybrand.com/es/

etc.

In the end I decided instead to invest in a .mobi domain and host the non-English content on:

fr.mybrand.mobi/
de.mybrand.mobi/
es.mybrand.mobi/

So, yes, in answer to your question, some people do actually use their .mobi (quite actively!) - though I'd be the first to acknowledge that mine is to satisfy the demands of a quite specific set-up.