If there's any one statistic about JETSET that is startling, it's the fact that now over 50% of our downloaded episodes are delivered through our 3gp feed, which tends to be mobile phones. When you include iPod and PSP distributions, the percentage of mobile downloads goes over 65%! Whoa.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that the target JETSET audience is teenagers and young adults, who are more likely to be using their phones, PSP's, and iPods to watch video. So that's cool.

But I wonder, how many of these viewers ever actually visit the JETSET website once they subscribe? Based on a cursory analysis of our site stats and some decent educated guessing, I would say about 15% of mobile subscribers visit the site to participate in wiki projects or post comments.

Having just analyzed our January website stats tonight, we're seeing an ever-increasing disparity in our number of total show viewers compared to web viewers. So it begs the question: how relevant is the JETSET website to the show itself?

For us, we thought our website was one of the keys to our growth phase last fall when we started involving our community in projects like Brandon's Pitch, Are You Happy?, and The Confessional. Now, however, we're faced with the reality that as our viewership has grown, we need to start thinking about how to engage a specific audience -- the mobile viewer.

Mobile web browsers are horrendous (hurry up, iPhone), so the prospect of creating web-based projects to engage that audience is not attractive yet. We will be testing some new ideas in the coming weeks that are intended to interact with this group via things like SMS, but it's amazing how reactive content creators have to be to their audience to stay on top of things. We never anticipated the prospect of potentially needing to think about show ideas that engage someone watching on a specific device.

The audience really has the power now, and that's why this is so different from traditional media.

I don't think the website will ever go away, but it has to morph and change rapidly. For example, should I be thinking about creating a mobile version of the site for easier viewing on phones? The answer to that is probably yes.

What do you think? Are websites for videoblog shows becoming less relevant?

UPDATE: I neglected to include 3rd party distributions in the percentage of our total viewership. Including distributions like TV Tonic, DivX, Shozu, and a few others, the percentage of mobile distributions goes from 65% to 55%. As you were.