blog.mobi

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. Over on http://dev.mobi, 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 dev.mobi 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?