One hundred days after launch, USA Today Sports? site For The Win has seen mobile eclipse desktop traffic.

USA Today Sports launched For The Win in April as a site that exclusively focuses on social news. Given the overlap of social media usage that happens on mobile, it is no surprise that the company sees upwards of 50 percent of traffic coming just from smartphones.

?The entire site was built with the storytelling itself around two ideas: social distribution and the way that people find, discover and share content and mobile consumption as the way that people are getting news and following sports,? said Jamie Mottram, vice president of content development at USA Today Sports, Washington.

Designing for mobile
Five to ten editors and writers produce daily content with visuals and multimedia playing a key role.

For example, a recent story about PGA Championship winner Jason Dufner uses GIFs to show readers the athlete hugging his wife after the win. The post also included an embedded video.

All of the content works cross-platform, but the focus is clearly on mobile when consumers only have a few minutes to quickly catch up on the news.

According to comScore, For The Win is the only sports site within the company?s top 25 sites with mobile bringing in more traffic than desktop.

Smartphones rake in about half of the site?s traffic with an additional 20?25 percent coming from tablets. The remaining 25?30 percent of traffic comes from desktops.

Although tablets do bring in roughly the same amount of traffic as desktop, Mr. Mottram said that the site is logically more focused on smartphones due to the higher amounts of traffic that the devices bring in.

Thirty to 40 percent of all traffic, or 60-80 percent of mobile traffic, comes from iOS devices, with the remaining mobile traffic coming from Android devices.

The site has also undergone close to 50 product improvements since launching.

Mobile content appears in a feed

Growing audience
In the first full month of launch in May, For The Win brought in 4.9 million unique visitors. This number grew 15 percent month-over-month in June.

Unique visitors in July grew 40 percent month-over-month, and For The Win now brings in an audience of 8.1 million unique visitors.

The majority of readers come to the site as a result of seeing a story elsewhere on a social media portal.

Dial?s Right Guard has been sponsoring the site since its launch. The brand was meant to serve as the initial launch partner for two months but has extended its partnership with For The Win. 

In addition to display ads, there is also a section at the top of the screen that marks content as sponsored by Right Guard. A click-through on the ads from either a desktop or mobile device leads to Right Guard?s Facebook page.

For The Win does not have any immediate plans to try native advertising but acknowledges that is a monetization method it might consider in the future.

?The biggest takeaway from the first 100 days was how high the mobile consumption rates were,? Mr. Mottram said.

?We knew that we were building the site so that it would be a really good experience on phones, but when it came back that 50 percent of usage was on phones, that was astounding to us,? he said.

?The next step is about how to take the mobile experience from good to great.?

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York