The Mobile Data Association has announced the latest quarterly stats for mobile web usage. And, to be honest, they’re really disappointing.
Why? Well, they’re meaningless.
The main issue is that (like many such stats) they make no distinction between downloads and browsing, which is a big difference in user behaviour.
Secondly, the headline of 40.7 million users in the quarter might be true, but it overstates usage considerably. What it actually means is that 13 million people used the mobile web in July, 13.7 million August and 14 million in September. In other words, it’s almost certainly the same people using it each month, albeit with healthy month on month growth.
The MDA is an organisation consisting of industry players to promote the cause of mobile data usage, especially among users. This is a laudable aim and one which we should encourage. But this aim isn’t best served by guarding the real stats, when clearly their members have access to everything the rest of us need to know.
As an example, we’re currently poised on the cusp of a massive explosion of brands building mobile websites (or at least adapting content for mobile). If I’m a marketing director of a big brand right now, I’d want to know if it’s worth the investment and resources and some of the questions I need answers for are:
* What percentage of the mobile owning population browse the web with their phones (as opposed to downloading - a very different experience and mindset)?
* What percentage use on-portal v off-portal?
* How big is on-portal and off-portal? Which is growing? How quickly?
* What are the top 10/50/100 mobile websites by traffic? The MDA does list the “Top 10″ here, but it’s clearly anecdotal and random and if you know anything about it, just about as misleading a Top 10 as it can be.
* What kind of sites are most popular?
* Demographic breakdown of users
That’s probably the minimum I’d expect my advisors to be able to tell me and even then I’d probably have a lot more questions.
The MDA in theory has answers to all these questions, or more accurately, its members do. So why the reluctance to provide those who need it a proper business case for signing up to the mobile web? After all, the more sites, the more promotion, the more consumers surfing, the more money the MDA membership makes.
I suspect the answer is that although full of the best intentions, like many trade bodies, they’re frustrated by lack of resources and the politics of the membership. Bear in mind that if they want to provide answers to all these questions, all the operators have to agree to provide all the data and then actually provide it. Herding cats would be easy in comparison.
It’s a great shame though that the membership can’t get its act together and provide a consistent voice and the information people need to make decisions that will end up directly benefiting….the membership. I mean supposing you went to buy a car and the salesperson refused to tell you miles per gallon or what colour it came in, for confidential reasons?
Don’t get me wrong, the MDA has done some great work over the years - promoting sms, for example. What I’d like is more support for the work they’re trying to do and let them get on with doing the job.
Check out this highly interesting study from Finland: http://www.netlab.tkk.fi/~jakivi/publications/Kivi_Thesis_Final.pdf - there’s a wealth of real data on mobile usage, including top websites visited.
If we’d only have similar data from more countries.
Hi Russell,
some very good points. WAP has always been frustrating to pitch as we can’t find definitive answers to exactly the questions you posed. We keep seeing the X billion page views but this has no real meanings for us or to most of our clients. It just tells me that the operators are trying to disguise the numbers as they are not that great.
Usually when I pitch to clients or do seminars I ask the audiance to do their own research. Just look around them next time they are on a bus or at the pub. How many people have a mobile (usually 100 %), how many know how to send and receive a text message (usually 100 %) and how many know how to browse WAP (usually 20 -30 %).
As you say statistics can be interpreted any way you look at them but just by asking a few friends etc one can get a feel of the mobile market (SMS is king!). This piece of research: http://www.mmetrics.com/press/PressRelease.aspx?article=20061003-sms-shorttext
is interesting. It suggests that 15 % use WAP within the last month. The number I find hard to take is that over 20 % of consumers in the UK have responded to an ad and close to 30 % in Spain. This seems high but great news for the industry. Sometimes I sense that the people doing research and releasing figures have it in their interest to be optimistic (seems good to me!).
Amir
amir (at) txtfo (dot)com
44 7970 49 6624
In a market dominated by supply-side business models, few parties have a vested interest in acknowledging how small the market is and how slow it’s actually growing. For MDA to publish detailed statistics would force the entire industry to very publicly ask the question of what everyone is doing wrong.
Of course, on the pages of weblogs like this one, we have a very public ongoing debate about the rifts between licensing agreements, data tariffs, technologies and user interfaces.
And the research firms are producing reports outlining actual uptake. Last year, Gartner Group found that 3/4 (or more) of users with Wi-Fi devices don’t actually use Wi-Fi while traveling. Recently, In-Stat found that even though the smartphone sales are increasing, IT departments are unaware that Java applications can run on (lesser) regular mobile telephones, and users still carry a second mobile for voice calls.
Findings like these are both stunning and disappointing, indicating industry-wide failures in product definition and service introduction. We have failed to understand both market and product requirements, and we still don’t understand what users actually want. The reasons for this are myriad, and there is plenty of blame to go around.
I prefer to identify the over-MBA-ification of the business world which applies an ever-reductionist set of analytical models to virtually every decision to the point where every business decision is simultaneously logical, considered, analyzed and meaningless. This abstracted, cool and rational decision making results in a few innovations and a large swath of horribly-misguided products and services. It gives us mobile browsers that don’t work. It gives us soft buttons that keep taking us to services not worth paying for. And it gives us an ongoing love-hate relationship with devices and wireless operators.
From a business IT perspective, mobile data is a disaster, and organizations like MDA are incapable of addressing this topic purely by design. The reason is simple, membership organizations are designed to serve classes of members, and it takes managerial vision to gain support and develop sufficient budgets to actively involve the “user” community.
MDA management continues to sweep the disappointing results under the proverbial rug. Instead of leading a meaningful debate about what must happen, the focus is on keeping the vendors happy and membership dues incoming. While this is positive for organizational persistence, it quashes virtually all legitimacy with the supposed “user” groups the organization purports to encourage and represent.
Russell. disapointing they might be to us and we all know how they can be improved. So why don’t we all start a BIG ASK FROM MOBILE OPERATORS list? Help them to help us to help them - if you get what I mean?
Here’s a few for starters:
1) O2 recently sent me APN settings for my new contract phone. If only they had spotted that I had been using mobile data every day for weeks prior to receiving the settings.
BIG ASK OF MOBILE OPERATORS. Please see who has not accessed mobile data and send them all APN settings.
2) Data charges are tough to understand. Just try calling your MO and ask them “How much am I paying to access the Internet on my mobile?” Its so difficult that the operators own call centre and retail staff don’t know. And how is the consumer supposed to translate bytes, Kb and megabytes into everyday mobile internet use?
BIG ASK OF MOBILE OPERATORS. Make mobile data charges easier to understand. And because it is difficult to answer “How long is a piece of string?” make it really simple. Tell the user how much a day, week, month it will cost them.
3) Mobile applications either user HTTP or TCP data to access the Internet. Setting up the mobile handsets to differentiate between a Java and a HTTP session is complex. Some operators such as T-Mobile and Orange have one APN setting for HTTP and TCP data. Hoorah!
BIG ASK OF MOBILE OPERATORS. One APN setting please for all internet connections - HTTP and WAP (Hint. it will lower your support costs and increase your data usage so might be a good thing!)
4) Volumes of urban myth and negative PR surround mobile data and Internet use.
BIG ASK OF MOBILE OPERATORS. Work with us to rebuild consumer confidence through education, free data days, maybe even preload applications on the handsets that leave your stores and distribution centres.
Remember this is a WIN-WIN-WIN situation. Your consumer wins, the mobile industry wins and the mobile operator ARPU wins!
Anymore for anymore?
David
My company, Action Engine, is focused on the downloadable category of mobile delivery (not the browser) and it is amazing to me that so few standards bodies, reporters, and analysts are investigating the advantages and disadvantages between the different types of mobile mediums (SMS, Browsing, Downloads). Each medium offers unique features both in terms of consumer reach and usability.
Operators and content providers are hungry for this type of information and a better understanding of how those differences translate into usage and advertising impression/click-through rate advantages. The MMA (www.mmaglobal.com) is going to be coming out with some case studies and information at their general meeting in LA next week. Perhaps that will offer some more specifics and guidance for comapnies to consider when evaluating this market.
This is not surprising … also, not great news for companies like admobs which are dependent on delivering ads to the mobile web.
question is when do we hitl the inflection point?
these numbers and adoption also coralate to SMS wap-push usage which also
lags (at least for the US market that is).
My dos pesos …
100% agree with your questions and pushing to get answers.
From the UK perspective, I can give a “bottom” number for % of people who have browsed mobile web (WAP). Bango has seen in excess of 6 million unique UK users passing through our systems in the last 3 years. Since there are about 60 million subscribers and we don’t see all mobile internet users (yet …)
I’d use 10% as a bottom number.
[...] « Mobile Web Stats Disapointing [...]
Lots of good questions in your article - very similar to the ones our customers used to ask.
Of data that we have made public, we project almost exactly the same numbers as the MDA for users who have browsed or downloaded content. The number of mobile phone subsribers aged 13 years and above who have browsed is 9.73m in Sept, out of the total number of mobile phone subscribers of 43.5m (not 60m).
You can find lots of demographic data in the M:Metrics Q3 Quarterly Briefings that give a view on the state of the market:
http://brighttalk.com/event/EventConnect/0aa1883c64-191-intro
Please email irotondo@mmetrics.com if you would like to register for the Q4 06 Quarterly briefing on the 6&7th Feb 07.
Also thanks to Amir for calling our data on people sending a text message in response to an off-mobile (TV, Radio etc..) advert “optimistic” - we have often been accused of being pessimistic so nice to have some balance in the criticism.
[...] T-Mobile also made available a full list of top mobile web sites, which is a distinct contrast to what the MDA supplies on its website, as we discussed a few weeks back. [...]