Are you ignoring half of your audience? Think about mobile

If you’re not thinking about how your content looks to mobile users, you’re forgetting about roughly half of your audience. A little under 50 percent of Bleacher Report views come from mobile users. On weekends, that number rises above 50 percent.

And this is a trend, a great migration from the desktop to phones and tablets—mostly phones, still, despite all the tablet hype we hear. In a few months, the smart people at B/R tell me, mobile views will make up more than half of B/R’s audience even on weekdays.

So are you thinking about that half of your audience? Are you seeing the world through their eyes, or are you limiting your view to the traditional half? Half your energy should be spent on serving the mobile audience.

For a while now, we’ve been moving away from an online world where home pages, league pages and team pages are the drivers of traffic to your stories. Mobile users—half your audience!—don’t use them.

About three-quarters of B/R’s mobile audience is accessing the site on phones, not tablets.

If the question is “How does my story look on a phone?” the obvious first step in answering is to look at your story on a phone. Are there rich media elements that break up hard-to-read blocks of text? Is there video? Are there photos? Tweets? On the other hand, are there complex graphics that are hard to read on the small screen of a phone?

The Bleacher Report products team is working on improving the mobile experience. It’s completely overhauling the article and slideshow pages to make them more responsive to touch devices. This means that the large-image and swipe experiences that users get on the B/R iPad site will be introduced to the mobile site.

High-resolution images, embedded videos, tweets and other media types should look nicer, and be more interactive, when this new mobile site goes live early next year.

In the meantime, don’t forget to think about that half of your audience that you bump into on the sidewalk—because they’ve got their noses buried in their phones.