As the World Cup host nation kicks off the first match of the tournament today (Friday morning in America, Friday afternoon in Europe/Africa, Friday night in Asia/Pacific) versus Mexico, so commences a fascinating case study in mobile Web.
In South Africa, mobile access to the Web outflanks PC access (some estimates put mobile Web use at three times PC Web, but official statistics are hard to come by). Sports coverage dominates the top 10 sites. Two of these focus entirely on football/soccer. Of particular interest is SoccerLaduma.mobi – not only does it get the highest page views in the top 10, it also uniquely (we believe) gets more visitors on mobile than on the PC site (more than twice as many).
The following table shows the statistics for the top 10 mobile sites, or ‘mobi sites’ as they call them in South Africa, for the month of May, kindly provided by Nielsen. We will return in June and July to check out the impact the World Cup has had on traffic to the top mobile sites.
On the day the South African team, aka Bafana Bafana (‘the Boys’), was announced visits to SoccerLaduma.mobi jumped from around 60,000 to 90,000 – showing the hunger for football news via mobile. See this interview/casestudy for the SoccerLaduma’s mobile success story (including that graph with the big spike). The secret to this success lies in the early realization that the best complement to Soccer-Laduma the weekly print newspaper wasn’t PC Web, but mobile Web.
| Most popular mobile sites in South Africa in May ranked by unique visitors | |||||||
| As monitored by Nielsen between May 01 to May 31 2010 | |||||||
| Rank | Mobile site | URL | Publisher | Profile of mobile site | Monthly unique visitors | Monthly page views | Total sessions |
| 1 | SuperSport Mobi | supersport.mobi | SuperSport | sports | 720,205 | 4,958,736 | 1,345,051 |
| 2 | 24.com Mobile | 24.mobi | Media24 | news and sport | 315,774 | 3,765,380 | 955,568 |
| 3 | IOL Mobile | m.iol.co.za | Independent Online | news and sport | 261,124 | 859,474 | 376,581 |
| 4 | Soccer-Laduma Mobile | soccerladuma.mobi | CT Media | football (soccer) | 231,824 | 5,382,731 | 1,018,083 |
| 5 | The Grid | thegrid.co.za | Vodacom | social media | 228,439 | 2,420,414 | 384,901 |
| 6 | Junk Mail Mobile | junkmail.mobi | Junk Mail Publishing Group | classifieds | 126,733 | 587,044 | 182,349 |
| 7 | Webmail Mobi | m.webmail.co.za | Interface Media | 119,146 | 2,903,987 | 392,431 | |
| 8 | Football365 | f365-za.com | Teamtalk Media | football (soccer) | 110,851 | 613,989 | 171,565 |
| 9 | Job Mail Mobile | jobmail.co.za/mobile | Junk Mail Publishing Group | jobs | 105,415 | 1,142,800 | 154,850 |
| 10 | Times Mobile | timeslive.mobi/ | Avusa | news and sport | 80,387 | 655,091 | 209,404 |
| Numbers from: Nielsen, June 2010 | Extras from: mobiThinking | ||||||
NB: This table only includes mobile Websites monitored by Nielson. The key player that is missing from this list is the Vodacom portal (Vodafone) VLive. We understand from Nielson that this site will included from later this year. Judging by the statistics quoted by Vodacom on its informative media sales pages VLive looks huge.
| Vodafone Live/VLive from Vodacom South Africa | |||
| Monthly unique visitors | Monthly page views portal-wide | Monthly page views on the ‘www’ page (we assume this is the homepage) |
Click through rate for banner ads |
| 3.3 million | 43 million | 2.2 million | 2% |
| Source: Vodacom media sales | Via: mobiThinking | ||
Return here in the successive months to see what impact the World Cup has had on South Africa’s top mobile sites. May the best team win…
Comment below or email editor (at) mobiThinking.com.
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