Mowser set to expire: Founder: 80% of site’s traffic was porn-related

One year after launching Mowser, Russell Beattie has pulled the plug on his transcoding business.
Beattie, a former mobile developer for Yahoo Inc., had hoped to compete with Google Inc., Greenlight Wireless’s Skweezer and other developers that customize Internet content for mobile phones. But “active development on Mowser has stopped,” the entrepreneur said, citing decreasing traffic and a lack of funding.
“We haven’t been able to raise funding, and as a site, growth has been flat or falling for the past couple months because of various search-engine tweaks I’ve done,” Beattie wrote on his blog. “We’ll keep the site running for the time being, but we’re going to encourage others to not rely on the service as it could disappear in the future.”
A longtime evangelist for the mobile Internet, Beattie wrote that he’s come to believe the market “is limited at best, and dying at worst.” Mowser was designed as a “short term bet against Moore’s law,” serving to bridge the gap between wireless and the traditional Web, Beattie said the lack of quality traffic — 80% of Mowser’s traffic was porn-related — indicates that consumers won’t embrace the Internet on mobile until Web-friendly phones such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone become more commonplace.
“What’s going to drive that traffic eventually? Better devices and full-browsers,” Beattie continued. “It would be easy to say that the iPhone ‘disrupted’ the mobile Web market, but in fact I think all it did is point out that there never was one to begin with.”
Like several of his fellow Web-to-mobile developers, Beattie was hammered by bloggers last year following the launch of Mowser by critics who mistakenly thought the service stripped ads from Web pages and replaced them with its own ads. The controversy underscores just one of the many headaches developers face as they try to bring the entire Internet to wireless devices.