I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but I think it’s fresh and interesting enough to do it now.
Mad 4 Mobile Phones, put together this list of the top 50 - although it’s now grown to 64 - mobile related websites. Great job, Patrick!
Now before we look at the list, it is based on Alexa rankings which most people consider to be inaccurate, for various reasons. Alexa bases its rankings on the visits people make to the sites that have installed the Alexa tool bar in their browsers. Not included (as far as I know) are weightings taking into account RSS feeds. MobHappy, therefore recorded by Alexa at 157,028th and thus should be included in this list actually, should probably be much higher as most of our loyal readers follow us via a blog reader.
Having said that, in my opinion, Alexa ranking are a good indication of site popularity and it’s probably a good assumption that the number 1 on the list is bigger than number 2 and so on.
Have a look:
1. www.chinamobile.com 205
2. www.cingular.com 576
3. www.nokia.com 593
4. www.orange.co.uk 653
5. www.verizonwireless.com 684
6. www.sonyericsson.com 702
7. www.direct.motorola.com 948
8. www.gsmarena.com 1399
9. www.o2.co.uk 2444
10. www.mobile-review.com 2834
11. www.samsungmobile.com 2864
12. www.phonescoop.com 3156
13. www.carphonewarehouse.com 3299
14. www.vodafone.co.uk 3730
15. www.bell.ca 4187
16. www.nokiausa.com 4770
17. www.rogers.com 5037
18. www.t-mobile.co.uk 5141
19. www.mobiledia.com 6319
20. www.allaboutsymbian.com 6435
21. www.nokia.co.uk 6491
22. www.mobileburn.com 9427
23. www.engadgetmobile.com 9525
24. www.infosyncworld.com 10285
25. www.fido.ca 10624
26. www.e2save.com 11947
27. www.mobilewhack.com 12163
28. www.telusmobility.com 13000
29. www.phonearena.com 15325
30. www.three.co.uk 15631
31. www.3g.co.uk 17706
32. www.vodafone.com 18469
33. www.mobileshop.com 20575
34. www.mobile-phones-uk.org.uk 21861
35. www.dialaphone.co.uk 22522
36. www.onestopphoneshop.co.uk 22723
37. www.phones4u.co.uk 24198
38. www.slashphone.com 24966
39. www.clubsonyericsson.com 25835
40. www.mobiletracker.net 27650
41. www.thelink.com 29392
42. www.phoneyworld.com 31806
43. www.mobiles.co.uk 33364
44. www.celularis.com 34266
45. www.mobilegazette.com 40587
46. www.cellular-news.com 45537
47. www.coolsmartphone.com 46105
48. www.thephonespot.com 47294
49. www.cellphones.ca 54210
50. www.mphone.co.uk 56958
51. www.onecompare.com 71524
52. www.mobilerainbow.co.uk 81620
53. www.imobile.com.au 85356
54. www.ukphoneshop.com 93683
55. www.msmobilenews.com 123215
56. www.younevercall.com 140269
57. www.zyb.com 160180
58. www.mobilementalism.com 164271
59. www.mobiles.org.uk 165541
60. www.comparecellular.com 250190
61. www.mad4mobilephones.com 263133
62. www.66mobile.com 329587
63. www.3mobileshop.co.uk 380286
64. www.mobile-phone-directory.org 424921
What would interest me very much is if someone could come up with a ranking for mobile web sites ie sites that are viewed from a mobile phone and not on a desktop. I’m pretty sure that China Mobile would still be number 1 by some considerable margin - China has a lower penetration of PCs and such a huge mobile population that this must be so.
But based on our figures at AdMob, the top 20 would look completely different. In fact, I don’t think that the US carriers would even make the Top 50 worldwide sites, though we have far from complete information too.
AdMob came out of stealth mode yestreday, you might have noticed (though I’ve been keeping Mobhappy readers fairly up to speed over the last few months). We went public that we’re the world’s largest mobile network, with over 250 million page impressions available per month. So the stats we do have for the mobile web are probably more accurate than anything in the world.
Here’s a choice snippet for you. We can tell which handsets people are viewing the mobile web with (and serve ads accordingly). 8 out of the 10 most popular handsets to surf the mobile web with are made by one brand. Anyone care to guess which one?
This information is actually pretty powerful if you think like a handset marketer. How would you like to serve ads on your competitor’s phones?
Anyway, well done to Patrick for putting the list together. If anyone has any ideas how to compile a simialr one for the mobile web, I’d love to hear all about it. And stand by for more good news about AdMob.
Hi Russell, there’s at least a few missing from the 40 crowd.
winksite.com 118,129
tagtag.com 31,799
dodgeball.com 48,319
For mobile pages, i can only speak for winksite but we’re comfortably over a million a day. That roughly translates to Alexa top 6k or 7k on the fixed web, depending on one’s reach.
Hi guys,
I added another few sites to the list incuding yours Scott. We had left out ringtone sites this time and concentrated on sites offering handsets for sale, industry news and the major networks.
Also just added a graph of the top five.
Patrick
Russell,
We agree that Alexa is skewed since the user base is predominantly USA centric. I do not see our portal in the list although we should sit around 7/8th (not a concern to us - we are still in stealth mode).
What I think would be useful in relation to mobile sites for the future is to create something like Google analytics for mobile. The information that needs to be known to establish the ‘top’ levels in ranking are page views per day (mobile and web), average page views per visit (both mobile and web), number of registered customers, active customers, active by week/month etc, the number of uploads and downloads (if the mobile site is selling products, hosting UGC or is a social network it does not matter), the number of P2P transactions (one mobile to another), the number of IM and SMS transactions and so forth……………………….
Obviously giving this level of detail into a ranking list exposes a company to its competitors but what if we could volunteer this information into a closed network/industry ranking site and that in turn would publish to consumers some of the ranking lists. This would cut down on the number of companies issuing ‘hot air’ PR about being ‘the number one mobile site in the world’ and also form a level field for any company in the mobile arena to be able to understand their position and how to increase their position based on the key criteria.
I assume that Google and others will increase the mechanisms for ranking within the mobile arena but I wonder if we could get companies from within the industry to contribute to something open source in this area to help build this data.
My only doubt is the mobile operators participation, allowing for transactions from their network to be counted. They are the worst culprits for misinformation - especially total number of customers against active customers etc.
Congratulations to the success of AdMob.
There’s no search criteria that works (as far as I can tell), so I think the only way to get a similar list for sites actually accessed from mobiles is to aggregate the top sites from services like AdMob, where it’s possible to see which user agents are actually used.
Some of the really top ones shouldn’t be a surprise though, but after that it’s foggy.
At 54, 501 (http://alexa.org/data/details/traffic_details?url=mobilecrunch.com) MobileCrunch was also missed… and like Mobhappy, MobileCrunch has a large percentage of readers that are using aggregators - not to mention that like TechCrunch, a vast majority of users that don’t user readers do use the Firefox browser which is also absent from Alexa ranking which means that the site probably ranks much higher than this number indicates.
Thanks,
Oliver
Good list!
But it’s missing mini.opera.com
I have to make a little ad of my new blog of mobile and music content.
Let’s visit the blog.
I review a website where you do comparison of mobile phone tariff easy.
site name is http://www.bestmobilephonetariff.co.uk/sitemap.asp
http://www.mobilclub.org/