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July 15 2008
US leads in mobile web adoption
According to Nielsen the US now leads the World in mobile web adoption. If you are considering advertising on the mobile web, you may want to look at American consumers as well as the UK - at least for now.
According to a new report from Nielsen//Netratings, Critical Mass: The Worldwide State of the Mobile US consumers are adopting the mobile internet at a much higher rate than consumers elsewhere in the world.
The study found that the mobile internet population was enough for researchers to say that mobile adoption has reached critical mass in the US, UK and Italy. According to the report there are 40 million mobile internet subscribers in the US, roughly 15.6% of the mobile population of 254 million and a growth of 29.7 million in 2007, 12.9% in the UK and 11.9% in Italy.
“With highly capable devices, improving network speeds and millions of mobile users visiting individual websites over their phones, we believe mobile Internet reached a critical mass for mobile marketing this year,” said Nic Covey, author of the Nielsen report. “A confluence of factors will only further ignite this market, rapidly, this year and into 2009.”
Advertising is becoming a common part of the mobile Internet experience: 26% of mobile Internet users recall seeing some form of advertising while using the mobile Internet. Mobile Internet users are 60% more likely to be open to mobile advertising than the average mobile data user.
About 14% of mobile subscribers in the US access the web via an unlimited access plan; about half of all subscribers say unlimited plans are preferable to other mobile plans. 3G networks are most likely to have fully satisfied consumers because of the speed and accessibility of their platforms. The study further found that a full quarter of mobile users view ads while surfing the mobile web.
Leading the destination points for mobile users in the US are Yahoo Mail (14 million users), Google Search (9 million users) and Weather Channel (8.6 million users).
Interestingly while the Apple iPhone has obviously promoted some of the growth, it’s not the main instigator of this revolution in the US, the tope device in the US for mobile internet use is the Motorola Razr with 10% of the total, the Apple iPhone accounts for just 4%, the next model down is the RIM BlackBerry Pearl at 2%. However the iPhone is set to rise – it was only launched in the US at the end of June 2007 and so hasn’t got a full year of figures - and will encourage even more internet use as the study found For instance, 82% of iPhone users access the mobile Internet, making them five times as likely to do so as the average mobile consumer.
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