Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Among Big Properties, Apple and Amazon Have Greatest Portions of Mobile-Only Users

Thirty-five percent of U.S. visitors to Apple properties in February were mobile-only, compared to 22 percent for Amazon and Wikipedia, 17 percent for Facebook, 14 percent for Google, 11 percent for Yahoo and 5 percent for Microsoft. So says comScore.

That makes sense, given that Apple preinstalls a whole bunch of key apps on iOS (though some of us have stopped using some of them), and gives us little reason to go to its websites.

It’s also pretty clear why people would shop on Amazon and look things up on Wikipedia on the go, even if they don’t do these things on their desktop every month.

The folks who measure how many people visit websites have been slow — sloooow — to count up mobile Web, smartphone and tablet users. But comScore is catching up, with its new “Multi-Platform” rankings that combine desktop, Android and iOS usage by U.S. users. (What would really be great is global numbers, but this is a start!)

These are the same new rankings we wrote about in November, but today is their official launch out of beta. From now on, they’ll come out every month.

comScoreFebruaryThe order of the Top 10 U.S. properties are remarkably unchanged when you add mobile, though. The only significant gainer at the top is Apple, which comes in at slot No. 8, with comScore calculating an incremental audience of 54 percent.

ComScore notes that the average Top 100 property adds 38 percent to its audience when you count mobile-only visitors who wouldn’t previously have been included.

The biggest mobile gainers were Groupon at No. 47, with 36.9 million visitors, an incremental percentage gain of 223 percent; Zynga at No. 44, with a 211 percent gain — echoing the company’s bragging about mobile-only users on its last earnings call; and Pandora at No. 19 with a 183 percent gain. Aside from those three, nobody else in the Top 50 had a triple-digit mobile bounce.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”