CNET UK goes dotmobi, doesn’t believe in .m

By on May 8, 2008 in News

CNET UK has, if the news story from Netimperative is to be taken at face value, just realised that there’s a mobile internet audience out there.

Further, they’ve also recognised that their audience of TECHIES might just be interested in checking out their services via their mobile handsets.

What’s interesting to me is that CNET didn’t build their own mobile sites. Nah. They know nuffink. Or so it seems. They got the MoMac experts in to sort it out and use their GoMedia platform to build and manage the mobile services. Fair enough.

It isn’t that difficult, surely, to dynamically repurpose your content for a mobile device?

Everything you could possibly want is at the strangely ugly looking (domain name wise) cnetuk.mobi.

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  • http://whatleydude.vox.com James Whatley

    Blatant plug but I really couldn't give a monkeys.

    I've been reading CNET on my mobile all year (on Mippin).

    http://mippin.com/cnet

    *sigh*

  • http://simonmaddox.com Simon

    Wow, it looks *much* better on Mippin!

  • http://dev.mobi James Pearce

    Your title seems to be about the fact they chose cnetuk.mobi instead of m.cnetuk.com

    – i.e. you accept that a dedicated URL is the way to go (so that users can, er, choose)

    But your penultimate line seems to suggest they ought to be doing it with device detection. In which case m. would have been unnecessary too.

    That approach would mean that users would have to put their entire faith in their device detection :-) and would deny them the chance to override it.

    Imagine if (from your IP address) Amazon was so certain that you were in the UK that they never allowed you to buy stuff from amazon.com.

    So, not entirely sure what your point was after all that :-)

  • nbk

    Well, there are many reasons why m. (m-dot) might not really be the most intuitive thing to do.

    If you want to amange your audience expectation on mobility, its not really all that obvious from this audience experience elsewhere that a domain name ending in .com, .net, .org, in fact .anything but dotMobi (.mobi) – has some idea of mobile targetet usage in mind.

    Furthermore, the structural integrity of your brand is served in a lower quality by using m.<brand>.com, m.<brand>.co.uk, m.<brand>.cn and so on compared to establishing one single main global brand entry point for your mobile usage interested audience.

    Guess why Nokia can concentrate well above a hundered million mobile page views a month on nokia.mobi respectively ? Because they (consciously !!) manage the expectation that this is the place where you find their Mobile targeted stuff.

    My suggestion is that when you have a well working mobile targeted entry point unter m.<brand>.com, you will have a much more attractive entry point with a much stronger bundling and brnading power if you at least add another entry point under <brand>.mobi – the cost of twenty bucks a year is so irrelevant compared to the chances that its really unintelligble why so many people don't try it.

    Its really a NO-risk proposition in time where everybody has to bundle as many entry point to the same content (including typo-domains names) as possible.

    If cnet wants to have a really clean se´tupo under dotMobi they should define a distinctively clear global/local setup they should consider uk.cnet.mobi, us.cnet.mobi, fr.cnet.mobi, and so on as ther localized international sites…

    All the Best !

  • nbk

    Well, there are many reasons why m. (m-dot) might not really be the most intuitive thing to do.

    If you want to amange your audience expectation on mobility, its not really all that obvious from this audience experience elsewhere that a domain name ending in .com, .net, .org, in fact .anything but dotMobi (.mobi) – has some idea of mobile targetet usage in mind.

    Furthermore, the structural integrity of your brand is served in a lower quality by using m.<brand>.com, m.<brand>.co.uk, m.<brand>.cn and so on compared to establishing one single main global brand entry point for your mobile usage interested audience.

    Guess why Nokia can concentrate well above a hundered million mobile page views a month on nokia.mobi respectively ? Because they (consciously !!) manage the expectation that this is the place where you find their Mobile targeted stuff.

    My suggestion is that when you have a well working mobile targeted entry point unter m.<brand>.com, you will have a much more attractive entry point with a much stronger bundling and brnading power if you at least add another entry point under <brand>.mobi – the cost of twenty bucks a year is so irrelevant compared to the chances that its really unintelligble why so many people don't try it.

    Its really a NO-risk proposition in time where everybody has to bundle as many entry point to the same content (including typo-domains names) as possible.

    If cnet wants to have a really clean se´tupo under dotMobi they should define a distinctively clear global/local setup they should consider uk.cnet.mobi, us.cnet.mobi, fr.cnet.mobi, and so on as ther localized international sites…

    All the Best !

  • nbk

    Well, there are many reasons why m. (m-dot) might not really be the most intuitive thing to do.

    If you want to amange your audience expectation on mobility, its not really all that obvious from this audience experience elsewhere that a domain name ending in .com, .net, .org, in fact .anything but dotMobi (.mobi) – has some idea of mobile targetet usage in mind.

    Furthermore, the structural integrity of your brand is served in a lower quality by using m.<brand>.com, m.<brand>.co.uk, m.<brand>.cn and so on compared to establishing one single main global brand entry point for your mobile usage interested audience.

    Guess why Nokia can concentrate well above a hundered million mobile page views a month on nokia.mobi respectively ? Because they (consciously !!) manage the expectation that this is the place where you find their Mobile targeted stuff.

    My suggestion is that when you have a well working mobile targeted entry point unter m.<brand>.com, you will have a much more attractive entry point with a much stronger bundling and brnading power if you at least add another entry point under <brand>.mobi – the cost of twenty bucks a year is so irrelevant compared to the chances that its really unintelligble why so many people don't try it.

    Its really a NO-risk proposition in time where everybody has to bundle as many entry point to the same content (including typo-domains names) as possible.

    If cnet wants to have a really clean se´tupo under dotMobi they should define a distinctively clear global/local setup they should consider uk.cnet.mobi, us.cnet.mobi, fr.cnet.mobi, and so on as ther localized international sites…

    All the Best !

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