RarePlay recently announced initial findings of their Top 1000 Brands’ Mobile Web Presence Survey, identifying that only 8% of the Top 1000 U.S. brands surveyed have sites compatible with mobile web browsers.

This small percent is significant considering that wireless devices such as cell phones and PDAs have limited bandwidth and small displays that make viewing a standard web site difficult or impossible.

Most industries have a few brands with mobile web versions, however the ones with the highest adoption rates fall into five main categories:

• Internet & ISPs (23%)
• travel (18%)
• insurance companies (17%)
• entertainment (17%)
• electronics/home appliances (16%)
• pharmaceutical, retail, and educational segments have mobile web site adoption rates of 1% or less.

Brands were placed into 1 of 15 categories then processed using inSitesEngine, RarePlay’s platform for distilling web intelligence, to determine Mobile Web Presence, which was measured by identifying the utilization of at least one of nine known mobile domain formats by the brand.

“Brands like BMW, RedBull and T.G.I. Friday’s have adopted mobile web versions despite low implementation rates in their respective categories. As industry leaders, more brands will follow suit,” said Ron Knowlton, RarePlay CTO. “Today people have mobile lifestyles and they expect to have access to information from anywhere — mobile web capabilities provide just that.”

“An 8% mobile web adoption rate is small when you consider 42% of Alexa’s top 100 websites have mobile web versions,” said Bob Rattivarakorn, RarePlay Research Analyst. “Recent surveys suggest roughly 20% of the U.S. online population over the age of 15 accesses the Internet over their mobile phones — close to 30 million potential mobile site visitors being overlooked,” he added.