Digital analytics company comScore today announced that the number of people accessing news and info on the mobile Internet more than doubled from 2008 to 2009. In January 09 63.2 million people accessed news and info on their mobile devices, and 35% of those (22.4 million users) did so daily.
Other stats:
In January 2009, 22.3 million people used a downloaded app to access news and information.
Maps are the most popular downloaded application with 8.2 million users.
SMS is still incredibly popular: 32.4 million people used SMS to access news and info. Search was the most popular method of accessing news via SMS, with 14.1 million people using SMS search.
Social networking use rose by over 400% in the 12 month period Jan 08 – Jan 09
From the release:
“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” observed Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information. Social networking and blogging have emerged as very popular daily uses of the mobile Web and these activities are growing at a torrid pace. We also note that much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications, such as those offered for the iPhone, and by text-based searches. While smartphones and high-end feature phones, like the Samsung Instinct and LG Dare comprise the Top 10 devices used for news and information access, 70 percent of those accessing mobile Internet content are using feature phones.”
What we think?
The meteoric rise of MoSos in this period isn’t the main focus of this new release, but it’s worth mentioning early and getting out of the way. I’ve often felt that counting your social networkers is a false economy: people who use social netorks on-line are far more likely to experiment with mobile social anyway. It’s also incredibly important to attract those people who use the net for news and updates. The figure I feel is most important in the above article is that 22.4 million people were accessing news content over their mobile Internet every day. After all, one of the releases from ComScore we got last year was looking at this in terms of people who accessed at least once per week.
i imagine it was a bit rushed, and omitted some options that not many people talk about. Everybody knows that almost all new smartphones have web, so why show that basic operate at its bear minimum. Scroll up scroll down zoom in zoom out. Actually? which new telephone doesnt try this? How bout discuss how the text rearranges itsself. Additionally the texting, very poor review. Why didnt you point out you need to use the mic and text together with your voice? Overlooked ALOT of other more important features