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.

The .mobi Registry reports in a press release that people from more than 100 countries have registered over 100,000 .mobi domains in the first four days of the domain's general availability. They state that this demonstrates the great demand for these domains and offered this comparison:

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.

BusinessWeek's article, A New Wave of Web Addresses, attempts to answer this question about .mobi domains: “Who's signing up, and why?”