US tops in mobile internet usage
By Will Park on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 5:30 PM PST In Announcements, Research
The US is one confused wireless market. By some measures, the US lags behind Europe and Asia in the mobile industry, by other measures, the US is tops. Case in point, mobile internet usage.
A study from Nielson Mobile (PDF link) shows that the US ranks as the country with the highest percentage of mobile internet users. The study took in to account 16 countries’ mobile internet penetration rates, and concludes that the US is No. 1. The US showed a 15.6% mobile internet penetration rate, with the UK boasted 12.9% and Italy trailing with penetration figures of 11.9%. Interestingly, the mobile phone that served up the most mobile-web data was the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) RAZR and RAZR2 – not the iPhone, not some BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM), just a plain-old RAZR. Go figure.
“In the 16 countries we looked at, the U.S. is tops in terms of penetration and I would say that surprises me at this point,” said Nic Covey, Nielson’s director of insight.
We agree, that is truly surprising. Of course, all these “research” figures are highly dependent on the sampling population.
[Via: MocoNews]
Am I seeing things or did they leave out Japan, Korea, Australia and South Africa which are all mobile hotbeds.
..Finland.. Scandinavia in general.
But somehow the study finds not only that advertisement opportunities in the US is booming because of increased mobile internet popularity – but the users are also diverse enough to satisfy any and all market segments. (I especially liked the pie- chart that says 10.8% of the users are 55 years or older.)
..I just love surveys like that. We had something like those numbers right before 2000, and people could get to read news on the phone. It never took off, because it was too expensive, and still is. But hey – who cares about that, when you can promise people great commercial advertisement opportunities on “mobile internet” (read: “wap” or flipping on internet portals)..
But I don’t doubt that the opportunities for exploiting the operator dependent solutions are most likely to succeed in the US. And that the survey is right on the money here.