Why You Should Take Mobile Web Traffic Statistics With A Grain of Salt

We’ve all seen charts like the one above from StatCounter, often accompanied by headlines saying things like “the iPhone is responsible for 64% of all mobile traffic”,  “4.5% of all web traffic comes from mobile browsers”, or “smartphones are responsible for over half of all mobile page views”. These reports make interesting reading but I’m not sure how accurate most of them are. The data usually comes from analytics services like Quantcast, StatCounter or Net Applications. These services do a … Continue reading

Taptu: Mobile Web Growing Twice as Fast as Expected, Outstrips iPhone Appstore.

Image: Taptu Mobile search company Taptu released the fourth in a series of “State of the Touch Friendly Web” reports today.  The reports track mobile web trends and showcase over 100 new Mobile Touch Web sites each month. In the latest report (PDF) Taptu compares the size and growth rate of its Mobile Touch Web index with that of the iPhone and Android appstores.   By Taptu’s count there are currently: 440,100 Mobile Touch Web Sites 185,000 apps in the iPhone … Continue reading

The iPhone Does NOT Drive 50% of US Mobile Traffic

The last couple of days has seen a flood of  headlines in the mainstream and tech press trumpeting  “iPhone Accounts For 50 Percent Of U.S. Mobile Web Traffic” or “iPhone Drives 50% Of U.S. Mobile Web Traffic“.  Sounds pretty amazing and cool for mobile web designers, right? I guess we can stop maintaining those 20 KB page size mobile sites targeted at funky feature phones and devote all our energies to mobile Ajax and the JavaScript rollover effects that play … Continue reading

MWC09: A Flood of Mobile Statistics

The flood of  press releases from MWC has slowed to a trickle as the show winds down. This has given me a chance to catch up with another flood, the one of mobile statistics released at the show over the last three days. The most interesting numbers come from mobile  advertising network BuzzCity which conducted a survey (PDF) of visitors to the mobile sites of its 2000 publisher partners. The survey was actually conducted ON the mobile web which is … Continue reading

Explosion in African Mobile Browsing

Opera’s latest State Of the Mobile Web Report for the month of September focuses on Africa. It’s an eye opener for anyone with a US or Euro-centric view of Internet use on cell phones.  The report, which tracks the usage of Opera Mini, indicates that traffic from Africa is up 180% since January, 2008. Gains in some African countries are incredibly high.  September over January page views from Egypt increased 2300%, Nigeria 1690%, Libya 8537%, Zambia, 1200%, Swaziland  1700%.  Opera … Continue reading

Admob Launches Mobile Analytics Suite

There’s a real need for good mobile analytics. It’s difficult to get reliable statistics on mobile web usage particularly on a site by site basis. That could be changing soon, AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, is rolling out a new mobile analytics suite which looks very promising. It’s called AdMob Mobile Analytics and sounds a lot like a Google Analytics for mobile sites. It will be completely free and available to all mobile publishers whether they are AdMob … Continue reading

Great Mobile Web Statistics from AdMob

Finding data on mobile web traffic and mobile browser share is like pulling teeth. It got a little easier this week with AdMob’s release of their Mobile Metrics Report (PDF). It’s an analysis of data on mobile ad impressions for the month of September. AdMob will be publishing the report monthly. There’s loads of some solid information in this report; things like the most popular phones for mobile browsing worldwide and in the US, India, South Africa and the UK … Continue reading