Right now we have three price promotions going on, including great promos on .TV, .MOBI and .CO domains.

Our .TV promotion has been running since late last year, while the .MOBI promo was just recently extended through to the end of June! We’re just rolling out the .CO promo; it’s similar to the very successful Superbowl-related promotion we ran with .CO back in February. Check it out and signup to get a big discount on .CO domains this month.

How Our Domain Promos Work

Our promotions are usually done in conjunction with the registry operator for the domain extension in question. They extend special pricing to us, and we pass the savings along to you. Generally the registries are looking to lift sales of the extension and as a result, they usually require that you do some active promotion of their extension to your customer base.

That promotion can take the form of an email campaign, banner ads on your homepage, or even something like a Google Adwords campaign to drive traffic to your site, and to the specific domain extension that is on sale.

We try to make this as easy as possible for you by providing marketing materials like logos and banner ads when we can. For example, for the .TV promotion, we’ve provided a pretty complete package of marketing assets for you to use, including some videos that explain the unique value of .TV domains.

Signup Now

If you haven’t yet signed up for any of the ongoing promotions, head over to our promos page. As mentioned we have a trio of promos on right now:

• .TV domains are just $12 until the end of May, 2011
• .MOBI domains are available for only $6.17 (that’s a registry cost of $2.99) until June 30th, 2011
• .CO domains are only $15 for the month of April (and now May as well)

Thanks to Flickr user “The Justified Sinner” for the pic.

Many people who bought their .mobi domain names around the launch still have them and as a result, it’s worth it to do a specific campaign around .mobi renewals to remind your customers to renew their names now to avoid having them expire.

dotMobi Marketing Kit for OpenSRS Resellers

We worked with the dotMobi registry to put together a special marketing package for OpenSRS Resellers to use. You’ll find logos, stats and other information that you can use to reinforce the .mobi value proposition. You’ll also find some ready-to-use email copy that you can plug into your existing email templates, or use on your website to help encourage renewals.

Visit our .mobi marketing resource page to learn more and download the package.

It’s pretty easy to figure out your new cost for new .mobi domains:

1. Take the new Registry cost of $7.25
2. add the ICANN fee of $0.18
3. then add your OpenSRS Management fee

Assuming list pricing, that totals out to $10.43.

The cost for renewals and transfers is unchanged ($12.00 plus ICANN fee and OpenSRS Management Fee).

As mentioned this all goes into effect on June 1st, 2010.

Back in March, we reported that .mobi domain names had hit the 400K mark. The dotMobi registry announced this week that they've now crossed the 500K mark:

dotMobi, the registry
for .mobi domains, today announced that 500,000 .mobi domains have been
registered in 104 countries since the domain's commercial launch in
October 2006.

…

Many auto brands, such as bmw.mobi, ferrari.mobi and rolls-royce.mobi, news and entertainment players such as espn.mobi,
maxim.mobi, foxnews.mobi, businessweek.mobi and cnnmoney.mobi and
mobile operators including Telecom Itali mobile division TIM and
Bulgaria's Vivatel, have all registered .mobi domains, says the company.

“The
results demonstrate the strong role dotMobi is playing in driving the
creation of mobile content on the Internet,” says Neil Edwards, CEO of
dotMobi. “Most importantly, the mobile industry's consumer focus around
creating .mobi sites is bearing strong results in a short period of
time. Consumers finally have easy-to-use and affordable made-for-mobile
content.”

Speaking of domain name statistics, here's an interesting one: the .mobi registry is reporting that since its launch in October 2006, 400,000 .mobi domain names have been registered.

The press release has a boast-by-comparison: it states that in the first ten years of its life, the .com domain saw only 100,000 domains registered. Keep in mind that the ten-year span of which they speak is the period from 1985 to 1995. To give some perspective: this timeline of computer history says that in 1986, one year after the creation of the .com TLD, there were 30 million computers in use — and there was no ISP industry back then. Now consider the size of the mobile phone platform before .mobi months before the availability of .mobi: this article from May 2006 says that the worldwide total of mobile phone subscribers was 1.8 billion. That's a platform three orders of magnitude larger.

In contrast, it took ten years for the general public to register 100,000 PC-based domain names in the early days of the Internet.

I think that's an apples-and-oranges comparison, but it's an interesting one nonetheless.