Mobile Web Use Small But Growing

Web traffic from mobile devices remains low with 1.3% of all page views in December for North America.  But a new study by Quantcast found that the share of Web traffic attributed to mobile devices has increased 110% in North America and 148% globally in the past year.

Quantcast suggests that the accelerating development of devices, operating systems and browsers is driving the growth.

While Apple's iPod has a dominant 60% share of mobile page views this is being eroded by emerging competitors in the smartphone market. The Motorola Droid captured almost 4% share in its first full month, overtaking the Palm Pre. The Droid has also helped Google's Android operating system surpass the BlackBerry OS with a 12% share of North American mobile Web traffic.

Quantcast is predicting that mobile's share of page views in North America will increase to 2.3% in 2010.  Globally, mobile's share will increase from 0.95% to over 1.8%. A host of new devices from manufacturers Motorola, HTC and BlackBerry will fuel that growth this year.

So Where Do Mobile Users Go?
According to the Nielsen Company, Google Search was the top mobile property in December:

• Google Search - 28 million unique visitors
• Yahoo Mail - 23 million,
• Facebook - 19 million.
• Gmail - 18 million
• Weather Channel - 14 million

The overall U.S. mobile Internet audience was 62 million. The top mobile brands are roughly the same as overall Internet brand leaders.

Watch for Google search to gain even more as their efforts to provide search suggestions based on location and click-to-call mobile ads mature and gain acceptance.

Using Mobile Phones for News and Info Doubles

comScore reports that the number of people who access news and information daily on their mobile phones doubled from 10.8 million in January, 2008 to 22.4 million in January, 2009.

The second most popular mobile activity was social networking and accessing blogs, with 9.3 million daily mobile users. While social networking is only half as popular as reading news, it is growing four times as fast, up from 1.8 million users a year ago.

An estimated 63 million people accessed news and information on their mobile phones at least once during the month. Of those, about a third did so via a downloaded application rather than a mobile browser, with the most popular downloaded app being maps. SMS-based search proved even more popular (with 14.1 million monthly users versus 8.2 million for downloaded maps.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” observed Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

Google "Retires" AdWords Business Pages for Mobile

Mobile ads are a format of AdWords ads that appear on mobile Web sites, and are available as either text or image ads. Mobile text ads can also appear when users search Google from a mobile device. With either type of ad, users who click on an ad will be sent to a mobile Web page or to a business phone.

AdWords Business Pages for Mobile was a service that allowed businesses to create a simple mobile compatible Web page where people could learn more about their products and services. Users of this service have received notices that the page building service will be shut down on March 23. Google terminated this after just 14 months citing "low usage".

Does this mean that the mobile search ad industry is dieing? No, just a bump in the road.

This service was targeted to small businesses who manage AdWords on their own and don't have a mobile Web page. Many of these businesses prefer the option to connect users to directly to their business phone, which is still available. Larger businesses create their own mobile compatible Web pages.

Amazon.com on iPod

Amazon detects when you visit Amazon.com and redirects you to a different entry page. When you visit this link shrink your screen down to iPod size and login. They provide full functionality in a very lighweight view of Amazon.

Is Your Site Viewable By Mobile Devices?

“The Mobile Web Initiative's goal is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality”, explains Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web. “W3C and mobile industry leaders are working together to improve Web content production and access for mobile users and the greater Web.”

Check out the beta release of the W3C mobileOK checker service.

Google and DoCoMo Hook Up - Mobile Web

Google Inc's search engine will feature on NTT DoCoMo handsets, giving it access to 48 million new mobile Internet users in Japan in its push for overseas growth.
DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile operator, said on Thursday the tie-up on Internet searches, e-mail and other services, will help it retain users in a competitive market and raise advertisement revenue while cutting development costs.

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