Ground Truth, a US-based provider of mobile measurement services, has published a census-level analysis of mobile web domains. The company says that to attract the largest audience, mobile web publishers must deploy across multiple domain standards.
It has been observed that since the inception of the mobile web, there has been no clear consensus around how the various mobile web domains - 'm.', 'wap.', '.mobile' and '.mobi' - should be used. In this first census-level analysis, Ground Truth seeks to offer the required data for this debate. It says that no single naming convention has emerged to adequately optimise consumer mobile browsing.
In the week ending July 4, 2010, Ground Truth measured 5.01 billion page views that included requests to over 1.5 million unique domains. The data shows that 18,934 (1.2 percent) of those measured domains and sub-domains were mobile-centric, such as 'm.', 'wap.' and '.mobi', but 17.3 percent of total page views were served from those domains. The remaining pages were served from domains without a mobile-specific domain, such as 'www.' sites. Some of these sites, however, are mobile-aware, such as www.google.com and www.facebook.com.
Of the mobile-centric domains, the prefix 'm.' and the '.mobi' suffix appear about equally, but sites using the 'm.' prefix serve 21 times more pages than do '.mobi' domains, Ground Truth reports. Following in popularity (by number of sub-domains) are the 'mobile.' prefix and legacy 'wap.' prefix. However, there is significant disparity of actual usage (as defined by page views) between them. The analysis shows that 'wap.' is nearly as commonly deployed by publishers as 'mobile.' but is used 68 times more by consumers.
According to Ground Truth, the least popular mobile-centric prefix by a large margin is 'wireless.', showing up in only 37 domains, and serving just 127,110 pages.
Ground Truth claims to accurately measure any mobile website using True View, its patent-pending, census-based methodology. It seeks to provide precise site-level usage metrics across several measures, including: sessions per subscriber, pages per subscriber, pages per session and time per subscriber, on a weekly basis.
Search for more Case Studies/Industry study reports
Get customisable STM news alerts in your Mobile. Visit http://www.scopeknowledge.com/scoope.jar via your mobile browser to download the SCOOPE application
