It’s hard to get people to concentrate long on anything on their phones and tablets, yet YouTube seems to be the exception. The video service is quickly going mobile, with small screens making up 40% of its traffic now compared to 25% last year, a Google said on its earnings call today. In 2011, just 6% of YouTube traffic came from mobile.
Google’s not the only one rapidly shifting a 1 billion+ user base to mobile.
To put its transition in perspective, Facebook says it has 469 million daily active mobile users and 819 million monthly mobile users out of its total 1.15 billion users. It also has 219 million mobile-only users a month, making up 19% of its total user. Facebook doesn’t share what total percentage of usage comes from mobile, but 41% of its ad revenue comes from phones and tablets, up from 30% in Q1 2013, 23% in Q4 2012, and 14% in Q3 2012.
As former director of product management tweeted today, YouTube has been investing in a great mobile experience for the web and Android for a long time, and more recently for iOS since it took control of the app back from Apple.
Who is the YouTube of mobile & tablets? YOUTUBE! We made early bet & now accts for 40% of traffic. Great job @dobry2000 & team!—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) October 17, 2013
The increasing importance of mobile to YouTube underlines the need for it to work things out with Microsoft and get a high-quality app released for Windows Phone. After months of back and forth, Microsoft launched a YouTube app it created, but it didn’t meet Google’s standards and was shut down. Earlier this month, a much-stripped down YouTube “app” for Windows Phone was released that merely boots users to the m.youtube.com mobile site.
