Bango has released a new study that looks at the top PC internet sites to see how well they work over mobile. Surprisingly, half of them did not perform well. This indicates a serious problem for site owners who are seeing ever increasing levels of traffic from the mobile web.

Bango provides a mobile payments and mobile analytics solution (see the MobiAD interview with Ray Andersen, Bango CEO). They surveyed the top 20 most trafficed PC websites according to Nielsen Online, and found that fully half of these did not work well with leading mobile phones.

Bango research puts the percent of PC site visitors who are in fact mobile at around 3 to 10%. This is up from estimates of about 1% a year ago. But in fact many companies have no idea what percent of their visitors are mobile, and therefore are failing to keep pace with the surge in mobile browsing.

The net result is that they fail to present a “mobile-friendly” version of their web site.

And it is not just iPhone users that are surfing through mobile. Researchers at IDC say that 1.3 billion people will connect to the Internet via mobile phones by end of 2008, and the vast majority of these mobile browsers are using mass market phones from Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola.

“Our figures indicate that up to 10 out of every 100 customers are now routinely entering web addresses from their phones and hitting a site designed only with PC users in mind, which results in a bad experience,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP of Marketing and Alliances at Bango. “Businesses should be asking now which handsets, countries and languages matter most to their business and developing a mobile strategy to match this.”

Some companies trans-code their desktop website so that the graphics look better on mobile devices. While this is definitely a step in the right direction, it is not a substitute for a site designed from the ground up for mobile - with the proper graphics, features, content, and navigation.

Here is a list from Bango of the top 20 websites, divided according those which work on mobile, and those that don’t.

PC web sites that work on mobile:

• eBay www.ebay.com
• YouTube www.youtube.com
• MSN www.msn.com
• Yahoo www.yahoo.com
• Google www.google.com
• Amazon www.amazon.com
• Weather www.weather.com
• Facebook www.facebook.com
• CNN www.cnn.com

PC web sites that don’t work on mobile

• Fox www.fox.com
• Microsoft www.microsoft.com
• Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org
• Apple www.apple.com
• About www.about.com
• Ask www.about.ask.com
• Blogger www.blogger.com
• Real Networks www.realnetworks.com
• Glam Media www.glammedia.com
• Craigslist www.craigslist.org

Here is a sample image showing a site that is not working well with mobile.

Bango has releasing a service called “Analytics for PCs” which measures the actual number of mobile phone users hitting a PC web site and provides detailed metrics of these mobile visitors. It is available as part of an Early Access Program at www.bango.com/eap.

After reading the Bango study a while back I did approximately the same test for the top 20 Dutch sites. Obviously I don’t have the same resources as Bango has but the results were pretty much the same. About half of the top 20 Dutch sites didn’t load properly or at all.

However it should be noted that a couple of the sites that didn’t work properly did have a seperate .mobi domain and a mobile friendly website. The ‘normal’ domain just didn’t redirect my phone request to their mobile version.