Will Mobile Kill the Website? (UPDATED)

Sunday, March 08, 2009

No company or entrepreneur today, upon launching a new newspaper, would actually spend the absurd sums of money required to print the thing on paper and deliver it to households.  They would launch a Web-only news product, right?  Well, maybe.  I see a path that leads to the death of the news Website, as well.

I recently downloaded the USA Today iPhone Application.  It’s essentially the online version of the paper formatted for easy reading on a mobile device. It dawned on me: I’m never going to visit the USA Today website again.  I’m always looking for reasons to reduce my daily web surfing requirements anyway.  The more I toy around with the USA Today App and some others on my iPod Touch I grow increasingly convinced that the Websites for these newspapers are not necessary.  Someday, maybe, individual reporters will just have a series of mobile apps through which to push out there reporting to interested subscribers.

Sound crazy?  It might be.  But here’s a 1981 television newscast from San Francisco around the following “far-fetched” premise: “Imagine if you will sitting down with your morning coffee and turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper. Well it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem. …”

Meanwhile, our children’s’ college-age babysitter recently told us as she held up her iPhone, “I’d be lost without this thing.  I don’t even turn my laptop on anymore.”

UPDATE: My cousin-in-law says via Facebook that the answer to the question in my headline is no:

I don’t think mobile will ever take the place of full-featured web sites. The mobile presence will definitely get much much bigger, but, currently, there’s only so much you can do with the limited computing power and memory on mobile devices, not to mention a 3-inch screen and weak bandwidth from mobile providers. That’s why you get the apps with…  Read More stripped down content, which, depending on the site (e.g. as you mentioned, newspapers), is really a better experience than a full-on site with a bunch of ads all over the place.

So, I think you’ll continue to see mobile apps for content in addition to their web site counterparts. Major web sites make too much money from ad revenue to go strictly mobile. What we’ll eventually see are more powerful mobile devices and the sorely needed increased bandwidth from mobile providers, so that the devices will just be able to render regular web sites. A 7-inch LCD folding out of your phone will help round out the package!