Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

The folks at Opera have started publishing aggregate numbers for the user behavior they see through their proxy browser, Opera Mini. Interesting to see that their overall growth numbers and pageviews metrics are keeping their symmetric relationship with the numbers from AdMob. When you have just one independent source publishing numbers it’s easy to dismiss them as providing skewed data. When two sources operating very different products publish numbers that indicate the same overall trends it’s much more difficult to dismiss.

The part of the report that has me most interested is the list of top sites per region. In particular the list for the United States:

1. www.myspace.com
2. www.google.com
3. www.mocospace.com
4. www.yahoo.com
5. www.facebook.com
6. www.live.com
7. www.hi5.com
8. www.wikipedia.org
9. www.itsmy.com
10. www.ebay.com

Most of them not too much of a problem explaining. Social networking is huge, people create their profile, check back as often as they can to see if they have messages. No problem. Makes sense that widget providers ride on that traffic. Google is the default search on the Opera start page, Yahoo continues to have a great consumer brand presence.

How about Mocospace and Itsmy however? Really mobile-specific social networks. Assume that the users of Opera Mini are regular consumers, Yahoo and Facebook should be well ahead of Mocospace. Assume that they’re early adopter mobile geeks and it makes sense to have Mocospace and mobile specific services.

And what’s the deal with Wikipedia in there? Do folks actually use the search options from the start page and do Wikipedia specific searches? Is the “trivia night at the local pub” use-case popular enough that it makes Wikipedia #8 top site even when looking at such a large sample? Or are “mobile searches” no matter what the purpose tending toward Wikipedia entries in organic search results just because of the way mobile searches structure their queries?

Great to see data corroborating other stats. Can’t wait till the next month of stats comes out. My gut feeling here is that Opera Mini “went mainstream” during the final quarter of last year. Assuming the steady growth in users but jagged increase in pageviews was due to a shift going on in the userbase being catered to. So what we see in the top 10 is actually a blend of the existing early adopter user behavior and the new creamy middle consumer.

In the next few months those normal users should vastly outnumber the early users and we should see the brands from online filling up those top 10 lists and the niche behavior sites like Wikipedia falling out. There’s always going to be skew toward those who deliver info usable by folks on the go I would assume. The Yahoo portal has always hit those targets well, timely info about rapidly changing data of interest to large groups of readers. Will EBay remain in there? Does rapidly changing data trump relatively niche usage?

The word is out now that dotMobi is picking up the Mowser assets. Like I said in my post about planning to shut down Mowser, the problem wasn’t with Mowser itself or the technique of content adaption or the mobile web as a whole. We just weren’t able to run Mowser as a media site and make the kind of money we needed from advertising. The folks at dotMobi however have a much different position in the market.

They’re already hooked up with folks looking to go mobile and in a unique position to offer the service without the hurdles Russ and I had in reaching motivated site owners. Like we discussed at the last Mobile Monday in Silicon Valley, one of the most important aspects of planning out a mobile business is to have the right partnerships in place to give you a strong market channel. Working independently Russ and I didn’t have that. dotMobi is in an excellent position to be able to try out some different models with the technology that made up Mowser - and has an existing audience and constant stream of new users to try it out on.

I’m actually out in Dublin right now working with the dotMobi team to figure out where to integrate Mowser and what products and services would benefit the most:

It’s an excellent chance to explore some of the ideas that Russ and I knew we would find it difficult to put into practice, as well as a chance to work with some folks I hold in high regard. I had already been talking to James about Mowser when Russ decided to shut it down, so shifting the conversation to purchasing the Mowser assets was natural. I’m pretty proud of the way things turned out. Not the part where we failed and had to give up, but all the stuff that’s happened since then. There’s a real strategic fit with the Mowser code at dotMobi, it’s going to a great team with a genuine goal of making the mobile web better, and instead of just shutting the thing down and dropping it we managed to dig Russ out of some of that infamous debt as well.

I’m going to remain in Dublin for the next week or so (returning to San Fran on May 16th). In the meantime we’ll be figuring out how to integrate the parts of Mowser and working up some roadmaps. Most likely the Mowser site will not keep operating as such, though I’m not sure what the timeline is for migrating the services. Once we do have a plan we’ll post it to the Mowser blog to give the folks who are currently using Mowser time to switch off or change services if they choose to.