It’s a tough balance: On one hand, news sites have a lot of catching up to do on mobile. On the other, desktops and laptops aren’t going away any time soon, at least for one key market segment: people who spend their work days in front of a computer.
Martin Belam picked up on the discussion from the perspective of a publisher who doesn’t rely too much on desktop lunchtime traffic, pointing out that the Mirror is now getting more traffic from mobile every hour of every day than it does from desktop. (I’d like to know what metric that uses, but that’s slightly beside the point.)
There are plenty of publishers for whom mobile is absolutely going to be the most important platform very, very soon, and plenty more for whom it is already. There are also plenty of publishers designing very well for both, creating designs that work whatever size of screen you’re using, and creating journalism that’s easy to discover and use whether you’re on a bus at midnight or at your desk at midday.
Mobile can’t be an afterthought, either editorially or commercially, for a publisher that wants to survive long-term. But it’s not the only platform that matters, just because it’s the newest and the fastest-growing. We’ve seen this sort of rhetoric before. In fact, we see it a lot.
Mobile is to social as desktop is to search. Mobile is to the article page as desktop is to the home page. Just because mobile is ascendant and likely to become dominant doesn’t mean that desktop is going to die completely. The dichotomy is false. You’ve gotta do both.
Or, to put it another way, beware of zombies.