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Posts Tagged ‘percentmobile’

As more mobile phones become full-fledged Web-browsing devices, a small but fast-growing segment of all visitors to any given Websites will be mobile. But with so many different mobile phones and browsers, it is difficult to figure out where most of that mobile traffic is coming from. A new mobile Website tracking service called PercentMobile lets you track mobile visitors by device, cell phone operator, country, and more. All you do is insert one line of pixel-based code into the header of your Website and it does the rest. All mobile browsers can read the pixel code, unlike the Javascript required by Google Analytics, for instance.

PercentMobile is in private beta, but we have 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. Use the code freecoffee at signup.

PercentMobile is free, but the high-level data in the reports become public. (They can be made privaet by request). The service is built on top of TigTags, an enterprise mobile analytics platform that starts at $1,000 a month. PercentMobile is basically a lead generator for that service.

To get a sense of some of the data you would see, check out this report for FourSquare, the mobile social network that MG is in love with. Not surprisingly, 76.5 percent of all of its traffic is mobile. Although it comes as an iPhone app, you can also access it via a mobile browser. The most popular device accessing it that way is not the iPhone (since most people use the app), but rather the Blackberry (9.9%), followed by HTC’s G1 Android phone (9.6%), followed by two more Blackberry models (8.9% and 7.4%), and then the iPhone (7.3%), and then another Blackberry (7.1%). Guess which platform FourSquare is going to develop an app for next? Yup, the Blackberry.

Every Website should know how much of its traffic comes from mobile, and from what devices and geographies.

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Parked.com, a company that specializes in monetizing - you guessed it - parked domain names, has acquired WhyPark, a 3-year old startup based in Willoughby, OH that provides domain name owners with tools to attract traffic to the web addresses with simple websites as well as tools to manage their portfolio and buy and sell domains on a virtual marketplace. The terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed.

WhyPark essentially allows domain owners to trade in the usual advertisement-filled landing pages that are so common with parking providers for content-driven websites that are supposed to draw organic traffic from search engines (scary line alert: “populate your sites with fresh content daily, without lifting a finger”). WhyPark also allowed users to monetize their sites in a variety of ways, a service that directly competed with Parked.com’s core business.

That means that both companies were in fact rivals to a degree, and that the acquisition means there’s good synergy between them, but at the same time it’s worth noting that Parked.com has always boasted about its exclusive focus on monetizing domain names and steering clear from all other associated services. This obviously is no longer the case now, and with WhyPark becoming part of the 10-year old Parked.com, the combined entity will continue to compete with Sedo (the juggernaut in this space) and the likes.

As Domain Name Wire points out, WhyPark as a result of the acquisition is moving to a free model instead of charging new users a $99 set-up fee like before.

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