Nokia wags its long tail in the mobile web market

Posted by Philippa Hobbs Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

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Netbiscuits, the mobile Internet publishing platform which powers mobile websites for brands such as Ebay, MTV, ABC and Universal Music, has unveiled data that suggests that there is a valid business case for publishers to optimise their online content for access by a range of mobile devices and not just for the smartphone A-list. Not doing so may mean missing out on sizeable chunk of traffic.

It revealed today in its first Mobile Web Device report that in February this year, 2.5 billion page impressions were made on the 10,000+ websites that it hosts, by users of over two and half thousand unique devices. Only three of these devices, one of which isn’t even a mobile phone, took a significant individual share of those page impressions: the iPhone 3G/3GS, the iPod Touch and the Blackberry 8330. The remaining 60% of page impressions – 1.5 billion in total – were generated by a global long tail of 2,505 unique devices.

It’s no surprise that Apple’s devices dominate the rankings. Netbiscuits compares the page impressions made in January 2010 on one unspecified mobile website by users from the US, UK, Germany and Australia, revealing the iPhone and iPod Touch’s collective supremacy: they account for between a third and half of total traffic, with the former’s share ranging between 23% and 46% and the latter’s between 7% and 12%.

But it is certainly not the case that in each individual market where the vendor’s devices are available it takes the biggest share of traffic. In Germany, the Nokia 6610i overtakes the iPod Touch, driving almost a quarter of total traffic to this particular website. Furthermore amongst the top ten devices in Germany driving traffic to this website, the Finnish vendor’s share almost matches Apple’s. In fact, Netbiscuits told me that if you take into account all unique devices detected, Nokia’s share is actually ahead of Apple’s by 2.3 percentage points, with a total of 38.6%, across 187 different models.

This ‘long tail’ of devices varies from market to market and, as Netbiscuits points out, between different types of mobile websites. The vendor is also quick to highlight the inherent bias of its own data, it being reflective only of the sites that it hosts and not the wider market. And there are some reporting flaws in the report that need to be ironed out. But considering that the website-hosting service offered by Netbiscuits is device-agnostic and that the sites hosted are available to a global audience, its traffic data by device should be relatively unbiased as long as differences in the target market of different mobile websites are taken into account.

So, a fragmented device market it may be, but ignoring this ‘long tail’ may mean ignoring a base of users that collectively generate the most traffic and, as Netbiscuits says, ‘intentionally locking out the vast majority of all web-enabled handsets and their users from your content and services’.

To read the full Netbiscuits report, click here.