The Mobile Web is live and kicking

Oh yeah baby! It surely is. When I walk down the street or sit on the bus, folks are casually chatting about doing stuff on the mobile web. The combination of the launch of the iphone advertising campaign for O2 (which shows lots of commonly used websites rendered beautifully on the iphone) and the launch of facebook's mobile web version, it feels like the mobile web is taking off.

However, not everyone is singing from the same hymnsheet. The much respected Russell Beattie has closed down Mowser, his reasons being that it wasn't making money and he no longer believed in the mobile web anyway. Or words to that effect. I read his blog post on the topic thoroughly and chatted with a few colleagues on the topic to get their reaction. They were both pretty bullish about the mobile web and felt that Russ had got it wrong this time and that maybe Mowser was always destined to fail. Bad news for Mowser, but good news for the mobile web in general.

And it would seem that the latest round of statistics from the GSMA, Admob and m:metrics would suggest that all is well in the land of the mobile web.

First off, the GSMA announced that there are 3 billion active mobile subscribers globally. Yes, that's right THREE billion.

M:metrics shows us (full press release and tables here) that consumption of mobile media is pretty healthy too with 36% of 18 to 34 year old males in western Europeaccessing mobile media and 9% of them responding to a text message advert (versus a 4% market average).

Interestingly, U.S. mobile users are more active consumers of mobile media, as unlike Europeans they use SMS less frequently for news and information retrieval and are more likely to have data plans, which directly impacts mobile content consumption. Among Europeans, the UK has the highest percentage of mobile media users, at 26.8 percent, while Germany and France lag, at 18.4 percent and 18.5 percent, respectively.

And in the UK, mobile media is attracting a highly desirable audience that is 44 percent more likely to be defined as ‘cash rich, time poor ‘than the market average and data from TGI M:Metrics confirms that one third of all UK mobile media users agree they are tempted to buy products they’ve seen advertised.

Meanwhile, over at Admob, they've just released their March report where traffic is up 10% on the previous month, 24.5% of ad requests globally were from smartphones and the Nokia n70 moved into the top spot for India. Interesting stuff. Read the full pdf report here.

And if those stats aren't enough, then check this post out from mjelly. 10 reasons why the mobile web isn't dead including the fact that 17 million Brits played on the mobile web in December 2007, 500k sites have been built on Peperonity, Admob publishes 2.5billion mobile web adverts monthly, flirtomatic mobile traffic triples their pc web traffic and getjar has delivered over 100m mobile downloads in the last 2 years.

Pah, doesn't sound like the mobile web is dead to me Mr Beattie.

Top mobile websites US and UK

Some more lovely statistics from the folks at M:metrics with the top mobile web domains as of March 2007. You'll see that there are no 'mobile' brands up there that aren't network operators.

Extremely useful handset and mobile web stats from m:metrics

As ever, the lovely folk at m:metrics have been doing their stuff again and have provided us with some juicy stats on the top 10 handsets in the UK by sales and by installed base. The really interesting thing for me about this is that all of the top 10 handsets by sales and 7 of the top 10 handsets by installed base have a colour screen, a camera and wap access. The future is bright, the future is mobile!

Top 10 handsets by sales (3 month average ending Jan 07) in the UK

Make	Model Name	Subscribers
Sony Ericsson	W850i	145,032
Sony Ericsson	K800i	132,978
Samsung	D900	109,752
Nokia	6230i	102,822
Samsung	E900	91,388
Nokia	N73	88,721
Sony Ericsson	K750i	87,187
LG	KG800 Chocolate	76,710
Samsung	D500	74,252
Samsung	D600	73,326

Top 10 handsets by installed base (3 month average ending Jan 07) in the UK

Make	Model Name	Subscribers
Nokia	6230i	1,614,909
Samsung	D500	981,663
Motorola	RAZR V3 Black Edition	932,762
Sony Ericsson	K800i	879,901
Nokia	6230	860,477
Sony Ericsson	K750i	792,681
Nokia	6280	781,564
Samsung	D600	774,267
Nokia	3310	769,520
Nokia	1100	744,444

They have also just announced their MeterDirect service which is the first research service to directly and continuously measure consumer mobile media behavior, unlocking mobile as a viable medium for advertisers. The first report reveals the top 5 US and UK Mobile Web Domains in February 2007.

The US sites are heavily geared towards things you would do on the internet anyway (searching, instant messaging and entertainment) whilst in the UK we're browsing the network operator sites. I wonder how much of that is an o2 user looking up what's going on on orangeworld for example or if people are loyal to their own network operator? Good to see the BBC up there though - it really is a good example of a mobile web site for usability.

Top Mobile Web Domains: February 2007
United States		United Kingdom
Domain	Company	Domain	Company
google.com	Google Inc.	google.co.uk	Google Inc.
yahoo.com	Yahoo! Inc.	o2.co.uk	O2 (UK) Ltd
msn.com	Microsoft Corporation	orange.co.uk	Orange Personal Communications Services Limited
live.com	Microsoft Corporation	bbc.co.uk	British Broadcasting Corporation
go.com	The Walt Disney Company	three.co.uk	Hutchison 3G UK Limited

The next M:Metrics web-briefing is on Tuesday at 4pm GMT

And Paul Goode from M:Metrics is going to be talking about trends in mobile content consumption prior to us all heading off to Barcelona. It's free to register and is well worth a checking out. And while you're waiting for the briefing, you might want to also check out M:Metrics latest thoughts on teens and (mobile) social networking.