Everyone latched on to the headline of this latest top 10 ranking from ComScore, with Facebook taking the top spot in terms of unique visitors, but I don’t think this is by far the biggest takeaway for developers. With the hiccup in users while Google Maps was moving from a native iOS app to third-party, it’s understandable this would happen. The fact that everyone is sharing this story shows how we just look for headlines.
The bigger takeaway is despite which mobile platform is utilized, Google is ruling mobile traffic. I don’t even want what the rankings would look like if you used traffic coming from mobile browsers (personally, I use YouTube in Chrome as opposed to the native app), or other applications (anyone else read their Gmail on the other mail apps too?). What you are reading is correct, after Facebook the next top five apps have the word “Google” associated with it.
On top of that, the biggest surprise for me is how over 36 million people use Yahoo messenger on their mobile devices. I thought everyone used texts, Facebook, and Twitter to communicate these days. There is something to be said for branding inertia carrying over to other platforms. I will be very interested in seeing where Yahoo Messenger’s traffic trends in 2013. The same could be said for Pandora, which many have argued was on the decline in streaming media. With Spotify utilizing it’s own streaming radio, again we will see what happens this year.
Chris Murman 