The mobile internet increases the audience reach of leading websites by an average of 13 percent, according to Nielsen. The metrics company has a new report — TotalWeb — which integrates data from Nielsen Mobile and Nielsen Online to show the unduplicated, unique audience for more than 200 leading sites. The findings are that the mobile internet not only increases the number of times people visit a site, but also the total number of people who visit a particular site.
The increase in audience varies by category, with weather sites increasing their audience an average of 22 percent, while shopping/auction sites increased their audience an average of 1 percent (ie, it’s mostly the same people using it on mobile as on PC). Perhaps the biggest beneficiary is AccuWeather.com, which gets a 43 percent audience lift from mobile.
The categories, with their average lift in audience reach:
Weather — 22 percent
Entertainment — 22 percent
Games — 15 percent
Music — 15 percent
Email — 11 percent
Sports — 10 percent
Business/Finance — 4 percent
Social Networking — 3 percent
Search — 2 percent
Shopping/auctions — 1 percent
It’s not clear these findings can be extrapolated to much smaller sites, but it does indicate that some people use certain websites on their mobile but not on their PC, and therefore that they’re being used in a slightly different manner. And although few sites would scoff at an extra 13 percent audience, the findings also indicate that even in the most mobile categories like weather and entertainment about four out of every five visitors on the mobile phone came from the PC version. The report also notes that 87 million US mobile users have mobile internet services, but 13.7 percent actively use the mobile internet each month.
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