Mobile web usage mimicking fixed web

Opera research finds WAP and .mobi sites are suffering

New research has revealed that web users generally replicate their fixed web browsing behaviour on their mobiles. That could dissuade some firms from investing in technology to alter the content and design of their sites to appeal more to mobile web users.

The first State of the Mobile Web report from web browser vendor Opera aggregated traffic from more than 44 million cumulative users of Opera Mini, the firm's mobile browser, and found Facebook.com and Google.co.uk topping the list of most visited sites in the UK. Other fixed web favourites such as ebay.co.uk, yahoo.com and bebo.com also rated highly.

Full web surfing accounted for 77 per cent of all traffic, while WAP and .mobi sites – specially designed for viewing via a mobile device - made up just 23 per cent of mobile traffic.

"People are truly browsing the internet and not mobile content sites," explained Oleg Tukh, product manager for Opera. "It's not about modifying content but about providing access to the sites already out there, [because] users are accessing the content they already know exists and not necessarily optimised versions."

However Christian Lindholm of mobile design consultancy Fjord argued that take up of optimised sites may be slow because of the "chicken-and-egg problem" of users not visiting them because the content is not there yet.

"I firmly believe in mobile optimised sites and support the efforts of .mobi, " he added. "If you look at the most popular sites, the priority for providing an optimised version is going up."

Vance Hedderrel of .mobi registry dotMobi added that "mobile content is just coming to the forefront" of users' attention.

“In November, as part of our find.mobi work, we scanned every mobile site with every mobile convention and saw less than 50,000 sites with more than four pages. In February, we did the same scan and saw more than 150,000 sites," he argued. "What would have been interesting is if Opera had done a similar story a year ago as a baseline."