dotMobi, the company behind the mobile-friendly .mobi domain, says the number of mobile-ready websites around the world has jumped by more than 2,000% in the last two years. Its 2008 study on mobile web trends showed just 150,000 mobile-ready web sites worldwide, while the 2010 study shows over 3 million sites. As a comparison, the number of 'desktop' web sites was reported to have grown from 150,000 sites in 1996 to 2 million sites in 1998.
The survey just looked at .com, .net, .org, .info and .mobi domains.
Trey Harvin, CEO of dotMobi, said "Many brands and businesses are seeing that mobile is a vital, unique channel and not just a smaller desktop Web. Big brands are now adopting mobile web strategies, but we still have a long way to go, given the ubiquity of mobile phones compared to computers. Small business owners must engage their growing mobile audience as large brands have. Tools like Dreamweaver and WordPress enabled this to happen on the desktop web by making site creation fast, easy and cheap. Developments like jQuery Mobile, DeviceAtlas and goMobi are now making this happen for the mobile web."
dotMobi says 40.1% of the top thousand web sites are mobile-friendly, dropping to 29.7% of the top 10,000 and 19.3% of the top 500,000.