Mobile Web publishers must deploy their sites across multiple domain standards to attract the largest audience, according to Ground Truth.

The company said that lack of standardization around mobile Web conventions presents hurdles for mobile publishers. Instead of opting for one, publishers should launch their sites across all the various mobile Web domains: "m.,? "wap.,? ".mobile" and ".mobi."

?What struck us most about this data was the lack of conformity in Web domain conventions to adequately optimize consumer mobile browsing,? said Evan Neufeld, vice president of marketing at Ground Truth, New York. ?We had expected to see a clear leader, and the lack of a primary standard will make developing mobile Web content extra challenging.

?Instead of developing a mobile site once, publishers must create multiple versions to comply with each major standard, or they risk losing audience when mobile sites fail to render properly,? he said. 

Dot-mob rules
In the week ending July 4, Ground Truth measured 5.01 billion page views that included requests to 1,555,630 unique domains. 

The data shows that 18,934 (1.2 percent) of those measured domains and sub-domains were mobile-centric, such as "m.," "wap." and ".mobi," but 17.3 percent of total page views were served from those domains. 

The remaining pages were served from domains without a mobile-specific domain, such as "www." sites.  Some of these sites are mobile-aware, such as http://www.google.com and http://www.facebook.com.

Of the mobile-centric domains, the prefix "m." and the ".mobi" suffix appear about equally, but sites using the "m." prefix serve 21 times more pages than ".mobi" domains, Ground Truth reports. 

Following in popularity, by number of sub-domains, are the "mobile." prefix and legacy "wap." prefix.

However, there is significant disparity of actual usage, as defined by page views, between them.

The analysis shows that "wap." is nearly as commonly deployed by publishers as "mobile." but is used 68 times more by consumers.

According to Ground Truth, the least popular mobile-centric prefix by a large margin is "wireless," showing up in only 37 domains, and serving just 127,110 pages.

Ground Truth recommends that publishers set up all three most-used sub domains: ?m.,? ?mobile.? and ?wap.?

When available, the ?.mobi? domain should be deployed as well.

?The still-nascent mobile media industry does not need any additional barriers to adoption by traditional media, and this data shows that the lack of leadership around standardization of the mobile Web may indeed be hindering its proliferation by making development and deployment more cumbersome than necessary,? Mr. Neufeld said.

Final Take
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