1ft Startup

I’ve been recenly lucky enough to author a rather large WAP system for a news agency. I’ve done my share of mobile development before, but never as a start-to-finish WAP project, and never for the launch of a site that already exists as a success on the standard desktop web, so it’s been a great opportunity to compare the two worlds. Below are some thoughts and observations.

Here’s what to expect from launching a WAP site:

• Far lower traffic than a desktop site. The mobile web still hasn’t caught on anywhere near the web. One business note: If you’re in a company that ties business resources to revenues and customer reach, this can make your life occasionally tricky.
• Far higher CP/M on ads. Ad revenue is extraordinarily high on mobile, orders of magnitude above the web. This is in large part because the click-through rate is also astronomically high. Why? I have a couple guesses:
• People using the mobile web are really just looking for something to distract themselves. While they may be deeply involved in looking for a specific thing or know exactly where they’re already headed on the desktop web, mobile users are more likely to be killing time until their number comes up at the DMV.
• People don’t know how to use their mobile browsers. I honestly suspect that a good amount of ad click-through traffic is a mistake. I think that this holds true for desktop as well as mobile, but it’s certainly easier to get confused on a phone and hit Select instead of Down on a 5-way pad (and the ad is, of course, right on top and already highlighted).
• Users will always make most use of the top portion of your site, and decrease their use linearly farther down the page. This sounds obvious, most well-designed WAP sites really are designed as narrow vertical strips with the important stuff on top — but I was a little struck by just how precisely users followed this rule. We tracked user clicks on our site, and the number of clicks on each link decreased in almost exactly the order in which the links flowed down the page, regardless of the link’s relevancy (I’d like to dream that we ordered everything from most relevant to least, but I know it’s just not quite true).
• When people do search on mobile (rarely), they’re even more often searching for porn. This fact of animal life is certainly true “in real life” on the desktop too, but it seems rather more prominent here. And people do search for a lot of porn. Definitely set up a Google sitemap for your mobile site and keep track of what people are looking for to get to your site. Australian ICT Minister Helen Coonhan recently called the mobile web a “Pipeline for perversion.” That’s probably overboard, but she has one thing right: Mobiles are a more personal device than desktop computers, and people may be prone to do more personal things with them.
• Being “on-portal” is awesome for traffic, but it makes you subject to the carrier’s whims. This sometimes means that you need to put a link back to their portal on the bottom of the page, or make other concessions about naming, and it almost always means no ads. If you are allowed to show ads (or if you can eventually talk them into it), expect the carriers to demand that you share around 45% of the ad revenue with them. Gangsters!
• There are a lot of phones out there, and everyone has one of them. Expect a really, really, really long tail. Out of 1000 hits, maybe 150 will be from the most popular device, 100 from the next one down, and the rest will all be 15-20 hits each all the way to infinity. This means that when you fix that bug that affects a single handset, you’re probably only improving life for a fraction of a percent of your user base. ugh.