The Three Takeaways From The Latest M: Metrics Survey
by Russell Shaw
According to an M: Metrics Survey released earlier this week, 44.10% of U.S. cell users sent a text message over the three-month period ending September 30.
That three-month moving average climbed 2.20% over the previous three month calculation. That would have been June-August.
What’s even more interesting, as gleaned from the facts in the canvass (reproduced in screencap at the top of this post)
Texting is more than six times as popular as mobile IM (7.00% of users) which I take to mean using one or more of those popular IM programs on your handset. So we’d rather text than IM.
Texting is more than four times as popular as sending emails via your phone (9.50%). No surprise there, since composing an actual email message on a cell can be a kludgy process. Plus, why take the time to compose an email if all you want to do is write a few words? Isn’t that easier to do via text?
Is mobile gaming declining? Check the chart. Downloads of mobile games are the only category that’s down. Although I’d have to see more of an ongoing pattern to draw a conclusion, it does appear to me that the market could be temporarily saturated. Mobile gamers have all the games (pre-loaded and chosen) that they want for now, and not a lot of new mobile gamers are being added to the mix.
Maybe both groups are waiting for more common 3G?
