Tag Archives: Mobile content

September 22, 2014 · 11:34 am

So 2004

I am meeting a former client for lunch today. As is the case so often, he suggested a local burger place to meet and I went to their website to check out the menu. It was a very pretty site – high quality photos, nicely written copy. Oh sure I have a few quibbles with it – why do I have to follow you on Twitter to see the specials? – but it’s a perfect example of what a site should have been about 10 years ago. Now? Not so much.

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 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What’s my beef with the burger joint (I crack myself up!) site?  It’s written in Flash.  Why is this an issue?  As you probably know, the number of smartphone users now rivals desktop.  Most of the site I work with see a large and growing amount of traffic from mobile devices.  A recent study about this stated that “Mobile is often the only tool used to make a purchase decision—this is especially true for restaurants and entertainment purchases.”

Sounds like good news unless your site is written in Flash.  You see, no Apple device – iPhone or iPad – shows anything written in Flash.  Many Android devices won’t either unless Flash is loaded onto the phone.  In this case I tried to access the site via my phone’s browser and was prompted to load Flash.  No separate mobile site written in a programming language understood by all phones.

By leaving development – even state of the art development – as it was in 2004 before the massive growth of traffic from mobile, this place is hurting its business.  As the study found:

One data point is especially favorable for restaurants. Of the industries analyzed for this study, restaurants have the highest conversion rate from looker to buyer—80 percent. The factors that drive smartphone users to make a purchase at a restaurant after seeking information about it are:

• Right price: 15 percent
• Right brand: 18 percent
• Had a location in mind: 19 percent
• Reviews were good: 12 percent
• Close to my location: 20 percent

How is the potential customer to weigh those factors when they can’t see the site?  When mobile is 51% of your potential traffic, isn’t it worth at last SOME investment?

Have you gone to your site on a mobile device?  How did that work for you?  2014 or 2004?

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February 13, 2013 · 1:56 pm

Mobile Data And Changing Habits

Let’s begin the day with a factoid:  last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000.  That nugget comes from the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2012–2017 which you can read by clicking the link.  Some of what it has to say – as with the growth of smartphone use, for example – isn’t all that surprising.  A few other points is kind of eye-opening:

  • Mobile network connection speeds more than doubled in 2012.
  • Android is now higher than iPhone levels of data use.
  • Mobile video traffic exceeded 50 percent for the first time in 2012.
  • By the end of 2013, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth, and by 2017 there will be nearly 1.4 mobile devices per capita.
  • Nonsmartphone usage increased 35 percent to 6.8 MB per month in 2012, compared to 5.0 MB per month in 2011. Basic handsets still make up the vast majority of handsets on the network (82 percent).

That last one is a little scary since it shows that there is still a lot of growth left.   Here’s the thing – a lot of this traffic was on cellular networks (as opposed to wi-fi), which is obviously why the telephone guys are upgrading like crazy.  I think the growth is as much about device growth as it is about the services and quality of the content available on them, and it’s this last little bit that I think will continue to drive things.  We tend to think of mobile devices as “second screen” but to me this study is evidence that they’re becoming a primary screen with respect to some content.  That primary usage builds habits, and one wonders when those habits will be reflected in viewing to what are currently primary screens.

Another nugget: the average smartphone will generate 2.7 GB of traffic per month in 2017, an 8-fold increase over the 2012 average of 342 MB per month.  How does that jibe with the bandwidth plans the carriers are selling?  If they’re refusing to sell an “unlimited” plan or throttling speeds over 2GB, how will consumers react?

We can see all of this happening already.  YouTube, for example, gets lots of views and while those views don’t eclipse the numbers that a major TV or cable network can deliver, they certainly are bigger than some of the second and third tier nets.  YouTube is not generally available in homes but is ubiquitous on mobile devices.  As YouTube behaves more like a cable content aggregator, one will see those numbers grow.  That’s what’s driving the numbers Cisco is predicting.  Is it driving you?

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