One of my favorite mobile search engines, Taptu, has just released the first edition of what they’re calling the State of the Mobile Touch Web report. They’ve come up with some special software that crawls the internet to find out which sites are mobile touch-friendly and which aren’t, and then run reports to look at stats of those that are determined to be ‘mobile touch-friendly’.
For a quick overview, you can see on page 7 of the report embedded below that they checked out a total of 112.6 million sites, 326,600 of which were determined to be mobile touch friendly. This is only about 0.29% – yeah, that’s right, less than half a percent. This is pretty pitiful when you consider how many more people have an internet connected cellphone than have a desktop computer.
Most interesting to me, though, is the category breakdown, especially when mapped against what *I* use my touchscreen smartphone to browse. 20% of the mobile touch-friendly sites scanned were Shopping & Services-related sites. I have only bought something on my phone maybe once or twice, so I find it really interesting that’s such a high percentile. No surprise that the 2nd and 3rd highest categories were Photo & Design and Social, respectively. I could definitely see social playing a major part of the mobile touch-friendly web, specifically for my own usage.
I also thought it was fascinating that ‘Places, Travel, & Local‘ sites represented only 6.6% of the mobile touch-friendly sites scanned. This seems like a major opportunity for someone looking to develop a new mobile-oriented site, especially as more and more people are mobile and using their phones for GPS and other location-based services.
You can browse through the full 21-page report here, free from Taptu. If you haven’t tried Taptu out, give it a go on your phone – they’ve developed quite a nice mobile-oriented search engine.
Ricky Cadden 