As you may have noted, I’m working with AdMob these days and as such, I’m spending a lot of time looking into the mobile web. As a reminder, AdMob is an advertising network, which serves text-based, pay-per-click as on our partners’ websites when they are accessed by a mobile device.
Part of my job is to look for mobile website publishers to work on a revenue share with. Or “can I give you some free money?” is another way of looking at it.
This isn’t a plug for AdMob though (but, yes it’s going very well, thank you!), but I thought you might find it useful if I shared some learnings and observations.
The first surprise about this world is the lack of information. If you want a list of the biggest websites in the world, I can think of 5 free sources off the top of my head. Global and local information is readily available.
Not so with the mobile web - certainly that I have found. I can’t get information globally or locally about any market from the UK, through Europe or in the US. If I’ve missed something obvious, please tell me, but I can’t find out anything.
The second eye-opener is that there’s a parallel universe out there, which seems to bear little or no relation to the computer accessed web. Unless you’re a heavy mobile web user, you simply won’t have heard of some of these big brands. I’m thinking of giants like TagTag and Peperoni.
In fact, of the top 10 mobile website partners at AdMob, I’ve only heard of two - one because it’s a blog (All About Symbian) and the other because I blogged about it ages ago.
While I’m not a huge user of the mobile web - I use it to check stuff like trains and plane times mainly - I am pretty knowledgeable about mobile generally and I found the apparent lack of importance of strong computer-accessed brands a bit of an eye-opener. Of course, with the lack of real data, this could be an assumption on my part. I know that the BBC apparently has a huge mobile web presence, as an example, but I suspect that this is the exception rather than the rule.
I also asked my pals at M:Metrics for some hard data. While they don’t currently offer anything on the top sites, they were able to tell me that 29% of UK adults regularly access the mobile web and even in less mature markets, such as the US, this is still as high as 22%. If you factor in that not all phones can access the mobile web (admittedly, probably not many now) and many can’t as they have the wrong settings, this is a surprisingly high figure.
If you know any big mobile websites, please share with MobHappy readers. If we start getting lots of information, I might try and pull together some stats and ranking system here - a kind of collaborative unofficial ranking. In the meantime, if you’re an analyst reading this, there’s a business opportunity here.
I’ll keep you updated in general terms, as my adventures in this paralell universe continue.
Image from the BBC.
O2 Active (URL = http://wap.o2.co.uk) is probably the leading portal in Europe (prob the world outside Asia) - takes over 50% of UK mobile web traffic - handing it off to the Content Providers offering services clicked through from it. e.g. Peperoni etc.
Thanks for the comment, Jag.
Yes, clearly the operators are going to have a disproportionately large presence on the mobile web, which is another example of the point I was making here - the computer accessed web is completely different from the mobile one.
It will also be interesting to see what happens to operator portal over time. I would imagine that they’ll decline in importance, but that’s not a guarantee, especially if the portals keep pace with what people are looking for.
Cheers
Russell
Hey Russel
You are definately right about the weird parallel world of wap… aside from lots of “mobile-only” brands and destinations the other interesting dynamic is the strength of certain countries. For example, Russian wap sites are often some of the biggest traffic drivers.
As discussed surfwap.com, mrader.com are good directories.
I want to have a big website, but then you already know how much traffic my WAP site gets (long time admob user
) And yes, I agree about the O2 portal being amongst the largest.
You’re right about it being a parallel universe - mostly dominated by kids.
prodigits.co.uk is the site to check. Frightening stuff….
It would be nice if Opera could give us some statistics.
umm… define “big”? how many imps per month are we talking?
I guess “Big” is probably in the tens or hundreds of millions of page impressions per month. O2 Active is in the 1000s of million (billion) PIs per month.
I’d classify “big” as being more than 1 million page impressions daily. I appreciate that puts O2 and other operators in a super-big category, but then again, they should be in their own classification at this point.
Russell
Perhaps you haven’t heard of Winksite.com. David Harper is giving amazing tools & infrastructure to everyday people and businesses! Users have built nearly 20k Wap sites through his Winksite.
I know because I am one of them. YUM! MOBILE is a Food and Eco/Green lifestyle portal that supports our Raw Food brand (YUM TUM). Our customers are so excited about our mobile service that The Wall Street Journal recently featured us in an article on Mobile technology. See our website for more info: yumtum.net.
On our mobile food portal visitors can get Recipes, Food News, Chat, Polls, User Contributed Raw Reports… In fact we are developing our visually rich Food! & Tools! sections for Ad support.
So, my friend we are out there!
PS: Yesterday, I had a conversation with some folks at Yahooo Ad listing telling them they need to build a Robust Mobile directory before I do!
web: http://www.yumtum.net
wap: http://winksite.com/yum/mobile
Yum - MobHappy was an early adopter of Winksite and is a featured site on the front page. So yes, we know ‘em.
Russell
There is some very recent data (March/April 2006)in a cell-phone usage report by Pew Internet and American Life Project. The authors are Project Director Lee Rainie and
Pew Research Center Director of Survey Research Scott Keeter.
The report starts out with a survey sample of features that cell users want and wish they had. For example, 4% of users survey use a feature on their phones to get mobile maps, and 47% don’t use the feature now but would like to have it. Many other statistics are reported about general usage.
The survey focuses on cell phones with internet usage, however contact with them might reveal that a PDA survey is in the wings.
Check it out here, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Cell_phone_study.pdf
The survey is part of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The research center is based in Washington, DC.
Follow-up:
Ms. Rainie wrote in response to my inquiry: “We don’t plan to do the kind of deeper analysis of PDA use that we have done with cell phones. At some point in the not-distant future, we’ll probably be probing the PDA-like applications on cell phones because so much functionality is being stuffed into cells. ”
Hope this helps.
Kamla Bhatt interviewed Scott Rafer of Winksite recently. The podcast is available on her podcast site:
http://kamlabhattshow.com/
- but it can also be downloaded via her blog at:
http://kamlabhatt.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/scott-rafer-of-wireless-ink-winksite-podcast-interview/
Fascinating interview!
[…] Finally, for our contribution this week is Russell’s post on the disparity between popular sites on the mobile web and on the fixed web. […]
[…] I’ve been working for a while with Omar on AdMob. Things have been going fantastic so far. It’s given me a lot more insight into what’s happening on the mobile web than any of the other stuff I’ve worked on. Omar is great to work with, and I got a chance to meet Russell Buckley and have some great conversations over the last week. So today we just signed the papers today to make me an official AdMobber! I’m sure that means I’ll be soapboxing about mobile web stuff even more than I have been so far. Right now however I want to let you know that we’re looking for a few more people for the team. We’re looking for engineers for the server side (LAMP stuff) as well as sales folks. Drop me a line at mike at rowehl dot com if you’re interested. […]