Community mobile media resources
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The mobile Web has gotten a bum rap. It spends most of its time either in the shadow of the desktop or playing the role of the native app’s frumpy friend. Luckily, we’ve got the tools to change that. Progressive enhancement, mobile-first and responsive design can help lead us towards a more unified, future-friendly Web. That’s the good news. The bad news? These tools are worthless if you don’t have license to use them.
Updated: Apparently The Boston Globe didn’t get the memo that it’s an app-only world when it comes to mobile. According to VP of digital products Jeff Moriarty, the Globe’s website, Bostonglobe.com, is doing quite well on mobile with more than 30 percent of visitors coming to the site through a phone or tablet browser. In fact, at a panel at the paidContent 2012 conference, digital publishers challenged the mythos that native apps provide a superior mobile experience than HTML5.
“We’re not building a video game here,” Moriarty said. “It’s news, photos and text.”
Useful comparison of PC vs. mobile web traffic.
Web traffic from mobile devices sees a sharp drop off overnight, and then gradually grows over waking hours in the USA, finally peaking at the end of the EST day, generally around 8-10pm.
Computer based web usage plays a distinct counterpart to its mobile partner — maxing out in an almost opposite time frame in the early hours of the morning, and at the most extreme making up almost 95% of all web use.
Great example of a useful web app that extends the life and relevance of data-focused investigative reporting.
Recommended tool to create a mobile-friendly version of an existing site, complete with functions to automatically redirect mobile visitors to this version of your site. Shovelware, but good shovelware.
Not free, but fairly reasonably priced. $7.95/month for one build-it-yourself site up to 1500 visitors/month, up to $199/month for 1.5 million visitors/month.
If your want them to build it for you, they’ll do that for a one-time fee of $650 or $1200, depending on number of page templates/forms they need to design and how many design iterations.
You can put ads on a MoFuse site, and this can cover the cost
The best book on understanding mobile web design: what works, and how to do it. Mainly intended for online services or e-commerce, but lessons apply to any site
Ubiquitous smartphones and always on access to umbrella social graphs are suddenly making these sort of tools possible.
And the opportunity is far larger than pick-up basketball, or even sports. Every school is a network, every employer is a network, every bar is a network, every office building is a network, every hobby is a network, every neighborhood is a network, and at an extreme level, every shared interest is a network, regardless of location.
This doesn’t even get at the disposable, or elastic networks as discussed by companies like Nearverse and Color – people that happen to just be nearby each other for a snapshot of time.
All of these networks share two common characteristics. 1) They are not yet graphed in a mainstream way by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Jive, or any other dominant, online social service; and 2) They are all mappable with a smartphone.
A Nielsen survey shows that a third of tablet and smartphone owners have downloaded a news app in the past 30 days. In addition, news apps can be very successful at driving deeper engagement with content. For people using NPR apps, for example, there are more pageviews and more return visits than for people using NPR.org.
But for all their success, the benefits of having an app (especially as an engine for capturing new audience) are starting to plateau, because apps are turning out to be most successful for only one segment of your audience. Research is showing that apps attract the particularly loyal segment of your audience who is already consuming a lot more news. In a study of tablet users, Pew found that these “power news users” spend twice as much time consuming news as do browser users. For users who want a daily fix and are proud advocates of stations, apps are the preferred channel.
But of course, stations want to reach a wider audience of casual users as well. And for this larger segment of casual users, mobile-optimized web pages are the preferred way to access your content.
As of March, 45% of U.S. mobile handsets in use were smartphones. Also:
“In March, 74.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device. Downloaded applications were used by 50 percent of subscribers (up 2.4 percentage points), while browsers were used by 49.3 percent (up 1.8 percentage points). Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 0.8 percentage points to 36.1 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 32.6 percent of the mobile audience (up 1.2 percentage points), while 25.3 percent listened to music on their phones (up 1.5 percentage points).”
