SeekingAlpha posted an interesting case study about the New York Times and its dropping online revenues. Here’s a key visual:

As part of my job, I spend a lot of time looking for good research on mobile and here’s a recent report from Opera – colored very similarly – about the number of desktop web pages served to mobile users:

These trends are not tied to each other in a linear fashion. However, one thing is certain – every time a mobile visitor goes to a desktop webpage, ad impressions are wasted and the publisher loses revenue. Flash ads don’t work. Neither do the desktop-format ads, like the highscraper and the horizontal bar. Users don’t see them clearly and don’t click as a result. CPC is down and CPM isn’t as high as it could be if true mobile ads were used. Opera Mini graph might as well be called “wasted opportunities for mobile advertising”.

But wait – the New York Times has a mobile site and an iPhone app, with mobile ads on them! Here is the problem – visiting desktop links on mobile does not invoke a mobile-optimized, monetizable experience. Search, Twitter and Digg links accessed by mobile users point to the desktop site. NYT hasn’t figured out the way to connect the two together yet. As link sharing and search drive an ever-increasing portion of mobile traffic, the dominant mobile use case is ignored.

How bad is the problem? Today, the share of mobile traffic for desktop websites is already in the 2-5% range, reaching 20% for specialized sites about sports and weather. Mobile traffic is growing roughly 200-300% a year. In two years, the mobile use case for desktop sites could reach the 15-20% revenue point. This can’t be ignored, so we recommend for every web publisher to deal with it today – either by building out a free mobile view with Mobify, or investing in a well-integrated mobile presence.

The biggest difference between Mobify and competing services (developer toolkits, plugins, site builders, native apps) is our users, the web design community. We go to great lengths to make sure that anybody with basic CSS knowledge can create fantastic mobile views for pretty much any website. We get a lot of letters with questions, comments and feedback about Mobify. It’s a great learning experience that lets us find out more about how the toolset is used. Today we want to share some of the recent feedback we received:

Amy: I’m compiling a short list of things I think could be improved…but overall, your service is such a time-saver. Designing and developing for mobile devices is still such a grey area and no two developers have been able to give me a consistent approach. I will certainly use Mobify again. Once I gain mastery of this, I’d be glad to work with clients who want to Mobify their site.

Sasha: “I don’t know what you have in mind for further development of the platform but if this help at all, I have a few suggestions. It may be useful to have specs for things like: 1. what size (px) should a website icon be (the one that becomes a bookmark on most mobile devices); 2. providing display widths (px) for each mobile device in design view. These things surely help us, designers. All in all, I’m happy with my experience and will continue using Mobify.”

Antone: “I am a designer rebuilding my website and looking to add a service for optimizing sites and designs for mobile devices. I tested the app with my site and think it is fantastic! I cannot wait to see what direction my affiliation with your company can go in.”

Carolyn: “I’m still plodding my way through learning my way around. So maybe after I’m an expert on the tool, I can provide more thought out feedback. So far some of the dificulties I found were keeping an uploaded image (or URL linked) banner – if I made other changes to the main content area. Eventually I gave up on that one with the Conf site and just made a text style banner. I’ll keep playing with that one – cause it certainly isn’t a major issue to me.

The other one that we are still playing with and testing before finishing the site up is my coworker isn’t able to get the redirect to the mobile for his device. He’s running a Blackberry 8330 on V4.3.0.124 platform 3.1.0.71. Could he have some personal setting that tells his device to override mobile sites – or is his not picked up the javascript redirect?”

Anthony: I came across Mobify from css-tricks, amazed at how well their site looked on my phone. Since the process looked so simple, I thought I may as well throw together a mobile version of the site since I had some spare time, I’ll be looking at improving it with a better heading and adding the WordPress plugin for the news posts too. 10 minutes later and I’d got something basic together, who would have guessed?

Kevin: Mobify looks fantastic and as a web developer, I will likely use it in the future when a client is intersted in going mobile. I was very excited when I found it. Attractive site design, by the way!

I don’t think it’s quite right for us though. We’re looking for something we can host onsite. Perhaps you should consider offering a premium version of Mobify, allowing users to not have to deal with redirects by letting them host themselves.

Keep sending your feedback and suggestions to team at mobify dot me!

One of the features of MOBIFY is mapping the source site to the mobile view (www.yoursite.com/category/article & m.yoursite.com/category/article). After installing a device detection plugin, search links work on mobile without loading the heavy desktop version. This presents several interesting challenges.

1. My mobile view appears in desktop search results. We most often illustrate this using the Digg example:

Some desktop sites are not very SEO-friendly, causing the mobile view to rank higher than the source. Google loves well-designed, well-structured sites with minimal noise. Mobile versions often match that description. Would you want to be ranked higher at the expense of your desktop version being #1? A quick fix for this situation is achieved by blocking search engine crawlers from seeing the mobile view.

2. Mobile vs Desktop Sitemaps.

Google has a whole section dedicated to mobile sitemaps in its Webmaster Central. It also has a section for desktop sitemaps. While the overall effectiveness of these can be disputed, should a mobile view have a sitemap of its own? Should there be two, in parallel? This is not clear when the URL structure and domain are the same for both properties.

3. Should mobile crawlers be driven to specific areas of a website?

Major search engines deploy mobile crawlers – masked behind User Agent strings of outdated phones like the Nokia 8300. Their task is to discover mobile-friendly pages. In the WebKit world mobile friendliness means a lot more to the publisher (from the revenue standpoint) than to the mobile user. We recommend only messing with this in case the point of entry to the mobile view is different than the index of the source site.

These are interesting decisions that come us as websites face several types of search and use context. Let us know if you have any stories to tell!

Today we’re very excited to announce a brand new feature – MOBIFY Analytics. Currently it is only available for your Pro mobile views – if you have one in your account, a new dashboard tab will appear. It looks like this:

Analytics information is collected for all types of mobile views (Basic and Plus), so if and when you decide to go Pro, the history of your mobile traffic will be revealed.

There are plenty of third-party mobile analytics services out there. Why did we do this?

The main reason is – many of you asked us to. Sure, AdMob Analytics can show you what wireless carriers in Bangladesh are popular with your mobile audience (and in some cases this information can be useful). However, core actionable metrics – pageviews, uniques, devices and referrers shouldn’t require going to an external site. Our mission at MOBIFY is to build the essential mobile publishing and monetization service for any website – this is just one of many features demanded by you, our users. We’ll give you everything you need to publish to mobile, as well as a straightforward way to integrate with any other analytics/advertising/search service you might need in the future.

Another reason for MOBIFY Analytics to exist is accuracy. Conventional techniques (pixel images, JavaScript, etc) are simply not reliable enough on mobile and APIs often take a long time to implement. As MOBIFY handles every single request to & from your mobile users, its ability to be accurate is hard to match.

We hope you enjoy this feature – let us know what you think!