The Mobile Majority

In a report published April 29th from Pew Research, "State of News Media 2015", the impact of mobile was obvious in just about every media source, type and niche.

Call it a mobile majority. At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of comScore data.

Pew created fact sheets for each of several news media types - such as Local News, Network News, Cable News, Audio etc... In each (or many) of the fact sheets, Pew notes whether the brand/source is:

• a traditional media company (TV, print, terrestrial radio)
• digital news outlet (web first - Huffington Post, Vox)
• mobile first news outlet (podcasting)

There were clear winners across business-models, and clear losers as well.

For every Vice there is a Gigaom. Below are the top digital news entities. Facebook and Twitter traffic and sharing is mostly mobile (roughly 60% and 70% of traffic respectively). With both being huge vehicles for sharing content - it follows that news would be being consumed via mobile as well. Will news media, or any of the industries impacted by the mobile majority move fast enough? Or will new entrants carve up large chunks of share - similar to how web-first properties carved-out, and then took over the print news business?

43% percent of enterprises say mobile apps are a top priority

Between Google's recent search algorithm update that penalizes non-mobile friendly sites, and the mobile majority impact across industries - enterprises are prioritizing mobile app development and marketing.