AdMob (my employer) released a whole bunch of stats about the mobile web today, along with some global and local trends and handset analysis. Given the frustrating lack of data about the mobile web generally, there’s some interesting stuff in there. It’s also based on the 1.5 Billion ads served every month globally, which means that it’s statistically significant, as well as probably more accurate than any other source of user behaviour in the wild.
You can see the whole sheebang here, but some edited highlights are:
The top 5 markets for browsing the mobile web are: US, India, South Africa, UK, Indonesia. Note that at least 4 of these markets have very cheap or fixed price data plans – I wonder if that’s just a coincidence? (note – that’s sarcasm in action, not a real question).
It’s also very interesting that the US is leaping ahead in this part of the mobosphere (is this a new word?), although sms literacy lags behind Europe and other parts of the globe. This might mean that the US will leapfrog sms and go straight to IM and mmail (email).
Further evidence of this is the huge share of smartphones in the US, which isn’t replicated elsewhere.
In India, the top 10 devices for mobile web browsing are Nokias. Nokia also has 30% of all global traffic, beating second place Motorola at 13%. This is quite an achievement, but one not refected in more developed and more profitable markets. Sony Ericsson is whupping them in the UK especially.
The iPhone is getting measurable traffic. But given that its browsing interface is a thing of joy – I’d have thought it would be doing better. Apple have sold about 1 million of them and there’s 233 million subscribers in the US, giving them about 0.4% share. That’s what these stats show too. Maybe the joy factor is being let down by the slow network speed making the experience a thing of j—–o—–y in reality.
A final note is that the UK streaming video to mobile is well past its tipping point, with over 50% of handsets supporting it, as well as over 75% of phones capable of downlaoding video. Viewing short video clips on the mobile phone (like a mobile YouTube) is going to be officially huge, as I’ve been saying forever. So there’s a good start-up opportunity here for someone. Note that this might be caused by a higher than average number of 3 subscribers using publisher sites within the AdMob network, but it is showing the way of the future.
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