Advertise here via BSA The Mobile Playing Field Today, a large portion of site traffic comes from mobile devices—namely smart phones and tablets—in addition to traditional PCs. Across the globe, mobile devices now account for 12 percent of Internet traffic, and it’s scaling up faster than desktop Internet traffic. The fraction of mobile Web traffic is sufficiently higher in nations with high smartphone penetration (for example, 20 percent of US-based Web traffic is via mobile browsing). What’s more, this figure is expected to grow significantly over the next 10 years, as smartphones evolve and mature in terms of hardware and software and adoption picks up in South America, Asia and Africa. Site owners have begun to take advantage of this trend over the past several years and have primarily relied on native mobile apps for top sites such as Facebook, Hulu and the New York Times. Moreover, up-and-coming Web services such as Pulse, Flipboard and others have even taken to a mobile-first approach, by building apps for iOS and other ecosystems before building a Web site experience. Native apps allow developers to create unique phone-first, touch-optimized experiences for users to interact with their content to take advantage of features like camera integration, geo-location and offline data storage. Targeting users on mobile natively makes good sense, especially within the US, where more than 50 percent of mobile users own a smartphone.
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