How much of Wolfgang Blau’s “office desktop” traffic will survive for brands like the Mirror?

Wolfgang Blau, director of digital strategy at the Guardian, recently tweeted about the shift to mobile apparent in news consumption over the last couple of years. He posed a challenging question – are we de-prioritising desktop design too soon?

His argument is that the 9-5 office desktop culture is too strong at the moment to be designing sites that don’t work well for desktop. Joshua Benton wrote up some of the ensuing debate for the Nieman Jornalism Lab.

I think it is a good question. Some brands – perhaps those with more business-oriented content like the FT and the Guardian – may retain that daytime desktop audience for longer. And obviously, I’d never deliberately design something to be bad.

But I am firmly of the opinion that where you have to make a business choice today for time/cost reasons, you should be treating desktop as the second-class citizen. And mobile as the first-class citizen.

Why do I think that?

Because of this…

July has been the first month where every hour of every day Mirror.co.uk’s mobile traffic has been larger than its desktop traffic.