CircleID

I'm in attendance at the the TRAFFIC EAST 2006 show, in Hollywood [Miami], Florida.

There has been a lot of buzz here about the .Mobi top level domain, ranging from the talk of early registrants hoping to create the next big mobile portal to those that were keen to see implementations of mobile content.

There was a domain name auction this evening where flowers.mobi sold for $200,000.00 (USD), and fun.mobi for $100,000.00 (USD) from a long list of domain names in the com, net, info, org, us and mobi extensions.

More about the auction below…

This conference is a major gathering of domain name registrants and website developers who have keen economic interests in the domain industry, domain monetization companies (aka parking companies), search engines, and internet registrars.

If one were to tally the overall base of domain names registered by the attendees, at least 20% of the world's domain name registrations were present at this conference — domain name registrants from all corners of the world.

TRAFFIC brings together huge financial interests who focus a keen eye on the world of online advertising and direct navigation using domain names, legal interests, and there was an educational session on ICANN that helped grow awareness of the facets of internet policy and governance.

The exclusive event, which is by invitation only, has become home to a unique experience that Monte Cahn of Moniker Online Systems has grown to legendary proportions — the live domain auction.

.Mobi, one of the fastest growing new top-level domains, had ten domains from their premium names list.

These ten .mobi domains all sold in auction with two very noteworthy transactions that I mentioned above.

Congratulations to the folks at dotMobi for this successful campaign, and to the auction operators here at the TRAFFIC show.

All in all, $4.75M (yes, that's Million) dollars changed hands on domain names this evening, with cameras.com selling for 1.5M on its own.

It was an exciting thing to watch, and I look forward to reading comments from my other fellow attendees who are also frequent posters or commenters here on CircleID that I have run into here.

By Jothan Frakes, Domain Name Industry Consultant. Visit the blog maintained by Jothan Frakes here.

Related topics: DNS, Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Mobile, Telecom, Top-Level Domains