According to a new report from FiguroMarketing, the number of available – and valuable – mobile marketing-related domain names is practically zero.
If you search domain names to find a great chunk of digital real estate on which to park the brand of your mobile marketing startup, you may be compelled to leave the .com behind.
“All the good ones are taken,” says Brian Figuro, CEO of a marketing firm launched earlier this month in Chicago. “New mobile marketing companies are having a really hard time finding quality domains because most of the really good ones have been gobbled up.”
Unfortunately, many of these premium domains aren’t in use by anyone, but rather held by domain squatters looking to turn around and sell the domains for a very lofty price to the highest bidder.
Of course, if you think domain squatters are bad, the problem is even more pronounced in the world of mobile apps.
“It turns out that squatters have moved into the app store,” observed Andrew Lim at Recombu in a 2009 report. “They’re worse than domain name squatters though, because you can’t even enter into negotiation with them. You don’t know who they are, or where they are. They take advantage of the fact that a developer can pretend to submit an app, but abandon their submission at the last moment, avoiding the need to actually create an application, but keeping hold of the app’s name. In limbo. Forever.”
To learn more about domain names, their availability, and their importance to a quality web presence, check out 1and1.com.
