Following on the heels of the latest release of the Mobile Internet Experience Update in October, Novarra  shared several bits of important usage statistics with the mobile industry.  Each on its own is interesting, but in whole they demonstrate an undeniable trend.  First, let’s recap some of the points:

• During the Major League Baseball World Series in the US, traffic from mobile devices to baseball-related web sites tripled on game days, as compared to off days.  More…
• In the UK, the wildly popular X Factor television reality dance conpetition drove mobile web traffic spikes of an amazing 15,000% to sites with show information and community on days when the eliminations occurred.  More…
• During the holiday shopping season, mobile traffic to retailer web sites on Black Friday - the traditional start of the holiday shopping sales in the US - skyrocketed as well.  More…

Much of this growth is driven by “traditional” Web 2.0 behaviors.  As noted earlier in this blog:

• Twitter ranked as one of the fastest growing sites for mobile web page views (not SMS tweets mind you, but browser-based page views).  From the start of 2009 to mid year, Twitter experienced 3500% growth according to Novarra statistics.
• Click throughs to URL shorteners such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com were up over 1000%.  This proves that the tweets we often receive via SMS drive many people to use the web (many who are not otherwise inclined to use their phone’s browser) when they click on a link in a received tweet.  More…

These are all intances of consumers transferring PC web and other media habits to mobile. Sports, reality TV, shopping are not unique examples.  It is clear to many of us that mobile can no longer be ignored as a viable media channel.  Another important conclusion is that when individual consumers drive the choice of web sites, and not “the industry,” it is ever more important that service providers enable a quality experience across any/all sites a valuable role to be played by the mobile network.

Tags: mobile internet, mobile web user experience, usage statistics