Mobile user statistics (and how they vary by website content)

I’m working on a mobile version of this website (alvinalexander.com), so I just took a few moments to look at the number of mobile users who visit here. Once I saw that number, I decided to look at one of my other websites, OneMansAlaska.com, as a point of comparison. Here’s what I saw (data via Google Analytics):

AlvinAlexander.com visitors

As you can see from the numbers, 90% of the last one million visitors to alvinalexander.com are desktop users. Without sharing all of the data, I can tell you that almost all of the 10% of the users who are using mobile devices are looking at less than 50 articles on this website. Most of this website is about open source computer programming and Linux -- over 5,000 blog posts -- so I assume that most visitors are working and come here to solve a problem.

OneMansAlaska.com visitors

Conversely, the OneMansAlaska.com website is all about my life in Alaska, and over 36% of the people that view that website are probably either (a) thinking about traveling to Alaska, or (b) they’re in Alaska and wondering about certain locations. (The One Man’s Alaska website gets much less traffic than this website, so the number of visitors shown in the image is much lower.)

P.S. - The name “One Man’s Alaska” is an homage to the book, One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey. A friend gave me a copy of that book before I moved to Alaska.

Summary

Make what you will of the data. My takeaway is that when people are working on technical problems they’re using a laptop or desktop, and when they’re moving at a more leisurely rate they use a mobile device. I know that’s the way I work.