My morning email update from Warc includes one of those breathless headlines, "Germany takes to mobile web." The teaser goes on to tell us that "the number of German consumers accessing the mobile internet has almost doubled during the last 12 months." Clicking through to the full item there is a reference to a report from BITKOM estimating that 18 percent of Germans had logged into the Internet using a cell phone. (They claim "a representative sample" but with a scandalous lack of detail about their method; we can probably assume online.)While that's almost twice as much as a year ago it's still 18 percent. This is roughly the same as current estimates of Internet penetration in Syria, to pick one of many examples. I was reminded of a recent report from comScore estimating that 47% of US mobile subscribers were accessing the Web from their device. Assuming that "mobile subscribers" accounts for virtually the entire US population (it comes close) this is roughly equivalent to US Internet penetration in the late 1990s.
So for researchers at least, mobile is still very much a niche, a rapidly growing niche but a niche nonetheless.
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One response to “Waiting for mobile”
I can only paraphrase the comScore numbers because I’m too lazy to check, but it’s something like 47% of smartphone owners use their phones to browse the web; smartphones comprise about 30% of the mobile phone market; and not everyone in the US has a mobile phone. So when all is said and done, in realistic terms about 12-15% of the US is able to answer web-based questions from a phone. That number will grow as a function of smartphone penetration, and I expect mobile web usage will also grow, but slower.