theregoesdave

Mobile web usage is surging dramatically this year, with Opera reporting that the number of pages viewed on their Opera Mini browser alone nearly tripled during the 6 months from November to May to nearly 3 billion pages per month. This doesn’t include iPhone users, who make up an even larger growth engine for mobile web usage. As mobile interfaces for mobile phones mature, along with mobile browsers and handset interfaces, we’re seeing drastic changes in how people surf the web on their cell phone.

Before the iPhone came along, people were very unlikely to perform general web searches on their phone. iPhone users are as much as 50 times as likely to use Google search as other smartphone users, likely because the larger screen means that they can make sense of the results better. Additionally, Google released plugins for Blackberry and Windows Mobile handsets that allow users to search directly from their smarphone’s home screen, thus increasing mobile searches as much as 20%.

So the question is: Now that millions more users are flocking to the mobile web on their handsets, what kind of information are they looking for?

Comparing Mobile Web Usage to Desktop Usage

The following information on usage is from Comscore’s May 2008 report on desktop web sites and M:Metrics most recent report on mobile web usage chronicling the top web properties by company. While they’re not representative of precisely the same period, I opted to go with the freshest data from each realm as indicative of the most recent trends.

Many of the same companies are dominating the mobile web as the web at large, with Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft taking the top 3 spots. This is likely due to the huge pull of webmail in terms of pageviews, along with other popular sites like Youtube and Flickr. This is surprising though, considering the fact that Craigslist, eBay, Facebook and Myspace are the top 3 individual mobile web sites.

AT&T and Sprint-Nextel both hold surprisingly strong placement in the rankings, though not unreasonable since they are likely to be the home screen portal for users of their handsets. It will be interesting to see whether they can evolve with the mobile web hold onto this place by becoming peoples’ mobile equivalent of the major Portals by providing offerings like sports, stocks and weather updates. Walt Disney’s online showing is also very surprising and somewhat of a mystery to me.

Weather is one of the most searched for topics on the mobile web is the US, where Sports scores are a much hotter topic in the UK. This may be seasonal, however, as it’s the midle of the football (soccer) season in Europe and the rest of the world.

Another surprising twist is the strong showing of eBay mobile web usage as compared to Amazon, who didn’t even make the mobile web’s top 10. Amazon has a mobile web interface and recently launched a service to allow users to purchase products by text, so it’s somewhat interesting to see eBay showing so strongly, espcially considering the fact that their mobile web portal is a premium service. The answer may lie in the fact that auctions are much more time sensitive and often cannot wait until you return to your desktop.

Check out the rankings below:

• Search Titans Take Battle for Market Share to the Mobile Web
• Is the Mobile Web for Weekend Warriors?
• What’s wrong with Microsoft and Yahoo’s incestuous agreement
• Windows Mobile 6.1: “Full Desktop Browsing?”
• iPhone Users Only a Small Percentage of Overall Mobile Web