Half of Top Ranked Websites Don’t Work on Mobile Phones
In a recent post on Mobile Entertainment Business Stuart O’Brien wrote up a study conducted by mobile analytics and payment company, Bango.
The Bango study surveyed Nielsen’s top 20 most popular websites and found that half of them didn’t work on a mobile handset, even though nearly 10 percent of traffic to these same sites is now coming from mobile phones.
And, it’s not just iPhone users that are regularly accessing the Internet from their phones. Researchers at IDC say that 1.3 billion people will connect to the Internet via mobile phones by end of 2008, and the vast majority of these mobile browsers are using mass market phones from Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola.
“Our figures indicate that up to 10 out of every 100 customers are now routinely entering web addresses from their phones and hitting a site designed only with PC users in mind, which results in a bad experience,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP of Marketing and Alliances at Bango. “Businesses should be asking now which handsets, countries and languages matter most to their business and developing a mobile strategy to match this.”
Bango says many major websites aren’t optimizing their content for mobile users, despite the growing importance of such traffic. In the list of sites that work well from a mobile handset you find names you might expect, such as eBay, Google, and Facebook. However in the list of top sites that don’t work well from mobile there are surprises like, Apple, Microsoft and Craigslist.
Bango’s study also found that many online sites didn’t know how many mobile visitors they are getting. Bango’s figures show that typically 3-10 percent of visitors come from a mobile origin.
I would think for bloggers and other sites with dynamically changing content a solid mobile website is even more important. I recently heard a presentation from MoFuse, a company which gives content publishers, like bloggers or real-time news sites, the ability to publish their content to the mobile web. You don’t have to be a content publisher to use MoFuse though, any website can be “mobilized” (the act of creating a mobile website from a web-only version) in just a few minutes using the MoFuse platform. It’s simple to do, and the MoFuse platform is free to use.
MoFuse is already the fastest growing mobile site publishing network and one of the top mobile publishing networks in terms of traffic. Companies already using MoFuse include: Mashable, Read Write Web, Cool Hunting, and MakeUseOf – which isn’t working as of November 6, due to a nasty blackmail scam / domain stealing ordeal.
Here are some shots of the Mashable site, mobilized with MoFuse:
MoFuse will be presenting at Under the Radar Mobility, November 12th in Mountain View, California. Drop us a line if you plan to be at the event and would like to speak with MoFuse or any of the other presenting companies.
