LOS ANGELES — Traffic and revenue-starved adult website operators may be dismayed to learn that half of all designers are leaving mobile visitors out of the mix.
Recent research conducted by Heart Internet in association with Design Shack, reveals that web designers often ignore the traffic and revenue potential of mobile web surfers, despite easy options for mobilizing content.
Surveying 500 web designers, the companies discovered that only half of the respondents consider mobile web access when designing a new website; a surprising statistic given the meteroic growth of this market segment and the proven profitability of mobile offers.
According to Heart Internet’s Marketing Manager, Matthew Telfer, mobile web access in the U.K.has risen from 0.2 percent of all web traffic in 2009 to 15 percent in 2011.
“As more and more users start accessing the Internet via their mobile phones, websites built for large monitors and high broadband speeds become more difficult to read and slower to load,” Telfer stated. “This increases the likelihood of a visitor bouncing before the page has finished loading, which in turn means the number of websites missing out on sales and returning traffic is also increasing.”
Telfer cites the latest crop of mobile development tools, such as goMobi, as evidence of just how easy it is for designers to rapidly deploy some type of mobile user experience.
“The volume of traffic accessing websites using mobile phones is only going to rise for the foreseeable future,” Telfer concluded. “Web designers need to start adding mobile usability to their list of services quickly, and those who fail to adapt to these changes risk being left behind.”
On the adult entertainment front, mobile traffic is often redirected to a sponsor’s white-label website, or sold outright; but the ease of going mobile today, coupled with the now much greater traffic volumes, may make these strategies worth rethinking.