In Q3, AddThis finds mobile traffic still on the upswing

Today AddThis released its Q3 stats on desktop, mobile and social media traffic. The Vienna, Va.-based social media widget is widely used across the Internet.
Here are a few highlights. The data cover July to September for websites using AddThis:

• Mobile traffic keeps growing: it has increased more than 6 percent every month since April and has now reached 37 percent of total online traffic.
• The most popular categories browsed from mobile phones were family and parenting, traveling and retail. The most popular categories visited from a desktop were finance and education.
• Politics and current events views were concentrated at 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., while sports views were distributed more evenly throughout the day.
• People want to travel more than they want to vote: travel was the number one category (11 percent) for shared online content, followed by politics (10 percent) and home (8 percent)
• Facebook still dominates sharing, with regular shares and likes ranking as the number one (36 percent) and number three (14 percent) methods to spread the word online. Twitter ranked second at 15 percent. Printing is still a thing, too. It ranked fourth at 8 percent of shares.

The analysis was conducted on 1.7 billion unique desktop browsers and 720 million mobile devices.