by Darla Mack
June 4, 2008 at 2:19 am · Filed under Studies + Research, Usage + Usability, mobile data statistics, Facebook, Research, Mobile Research, Social Networking, M:Metrics
In a release published by M:Metrics last month, a study shows that the American population spends over 4.5 hours browsing on their smartphones.
Looking at the trend it seems the most popular site visited by US users was Craigslist. To me, that’s surprising… then again I’m not a big Craigslist user. UK consumers favored Facebook, which was also another site visited by US consumers.
What is interesting is the time spent browsing. According to the data collected in March, US users spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes out of the month browsing Craigslist, while UK users spent an average of 1 hour and 45 minutes of their time browsing Facebook.
Not to take away from web browsing, but I hope developers are paying some attention to these trends. This would be the opportunity to create dedicated applications instead of having to rely on the browsers themselves. I know I’ve become a happy person since the Ebay application came out.
“People are becoming increasingly engaged in the mobile medium,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89 percent year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent. Consumption is quickly evolving from brief transactions, such as checking the weather or flight status, to time-intensive interaction with mobile Web sites—even without an iPhone.”
by Debi Jones
January 15, 2008 at 5:22 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, News, mobile data statistics, mobile social networking, MMA, Mobile Marketing
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) today announces its first Mobile Attitude and Usage Study for five key Western European markets. Mobile subscribers from the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain were surveyed to uncover insights into the region’s consumer mobile usage by demographic group.
The expected results found significant SMS use across all age groups with the most active texters in the 13 to 24 year age group. Spain and Italy were reported as the most active geographies for text messaging. The MMA report seems a bit conflicted with itself as it reports that “2 way text messaging is the most important mobile feature across all age groups,” but at the same time reveals that among teens text messaging was second to having a camera. Having camera functionality is the most important mobile feature to teens in Western Europe.
The rising importance of camera functionality as the most important feature for the golden teen demographic is profound. First, it follows the evolution of consumer behavior in Japan and Korea the most active mobile consumers on the planet. And second, the finding has implications for the future of mobile social networks and other applications.
The study also focused on awareness and interest in mobile marketing. The age group with the most exposure and awareness of mobile marketing was the 18 to 34 year olds. In other words, those more likely to have jobs and income of which to dispose. Experience with marketing messages among this age group includes: interactive voting, ads, and product/service information.
Also, notable is that one in ten subscribers are said to be interested in receiving marketing messages on their mobile if those messages are relevant and have benefit to the recipient. Acceptable marketing messages of interest include coupons, status alerts, and special offers.
If the industry is to continue fast following the youth demographic, it’s time to look towards image messaging and MMS. That is: if we find the results from the MMA to be replicated and credible.
by Darla Mack
January 9, 2008 at 10:18 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, mobile data statistics, Messaging, Research
According to an article on vnunet, research revealed that during New Year’s Eve sms traffic increased by 30 percent as compared to last year.
It’s not surprising that the holidays are the time of the year that people get their fingers moving to the tune of sending their greetings to friends and loved ones. Whats surprising is that the increase mostly came from the emerging markets.
While the Philippines holds its title for text messaging capital of the world, other areas such as India increased their traffic level.
Steven van Zanen, head of messaging futures at Acision, said: “SMS represents a significant slice of mobile operator revenues, and events like New Year’s Eve demonstrate how critical it is to ensure a reliable and speedy service.
“One operator’s infrastructure operated under peaks of 19,000 messages per second without congestion or delay.
“The New Year figures are eagerly anticipated each year and this year’s record traffic levels again do not disappoint.”
by Russell Shaw
November 30, 2007 at 10:27 am · Filed under SMS, Studies + Research, News, mobile data statistics, Instant Messaging, Messaging
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?
by Debi Jones
July 9, 2007 at 11:42 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Privacy + Security, mobile data statistics
Japan isn’t an SMS centric culture like Europe. This is ironic when you consider that SMS was created in response to the use of the signaling channel (on which SMS travels) by teenage girls in Japan for silent “note” passing among friends. However, with the release of Shamail and camera phones, Japan became, instead, a mobile email culture. I recall reading in 2005 that 80% of all the emails traversing DoCoMo’s network were SPAM. That’s a shocking statistic. The company pledged to deploy systems to manage and control the abuse of SPAM on their network.
The site Grumbletext created a forum for individuals to share information in response to unsolicited SMS and SMS scams in the UK. You can expose a company sending SPAM or scams via SMS, warn others and even be instructed on how to bring an action in small claims court. Grumbletext is an oft referenced resource for its anecdotal data on SMS SPAM campaigns.
Verizon Wireless has brought lawsuits against a number of companies that have used its network to send SPAM. Using federal fraud and privacy laws, Verizon pursues both civil and criminal remedies to punish spammer companies in inside the US. Most recently, Verizon Wireless filed suit against I-VEST Global Corporation operating in Nevada. Symantec, the computer security and anti-spam company, discovered the court papers at Pacer, Public Access to Court Electronic Records.
Ollie Whitehouse, Symantec blogger in SMS SPAM - Thnx - CU in court shares some details from the filing as well as providing pointers to the documents. I-VEST attempted to send unsolicited messages via SMS to 12 million of Verizon’s subscribers offering the purchase of stocks and real estate. Whitehouse writes,
We now have an example of alleged SMS spam with some real statistics rather than the usual conjecture. We know SMS spam has been growing through the monitoring of such sites as Grumble Text [1] however we’ve never had true insight into the scale of a professional SMS spamming operation.
Verizon Wireless intends to use both technology and the law to protect it’s customers from wireless spam and punish the companies abusing the network, as stated by the company’s general counsel. If technology and the law were enough, we would have been rid of spammers long ago.
Enter web 2.0 and the machine is us.
Project Honey Pot filed a $1+ billion lawsuit against John Doe spammers on behalf of 20,000 users of its software which creates the world’s largest distributed network of spammer trapping honey pots. From the site,
Honey pots are used to tag e-mail addresses that are subsequently phished by e-mail harvesters. By tracking the messages that are sent to these addresses, a trail can be followed that links e-mail harvesters to senders of spam. Project Honey Pot is the world’s largest distributed network of spam-tracking honey pots.
Project Honey Pot is an initiative by Unspam, leaders in e-mail, fax, mobile phone and instant messenger do-not-contact registries. The project employs volunteers and currently tracks and identifies harvesters, dictionary attackers, and comment spammers. Project Honey Pot has engaged John Praed called the “Spamhunter General” having represented companies like AOL and Verizon in major anti-spam lawsuits to represent organization’s members in the largest anti-spam lawsuit in history.
Project Honey Pot isn’t in the SMS spammer tracking business yet, but $1 billion would buy allot of resources to expand into an area where the founding org already has business interests.
SPAM presists despite the best efforts of technologists and legal minds. As illustrated in the Verizon Wireless v. I-VEST Global Corporation case, a system and it’s infrastructure to package and route 12 million messages in a burst would require expensive bandwidth and equipment. So, why do spammers spend large sums of money on operations and legal defenses? They are paid very well by those who choose to pass along the cost of advertising their products and services to the consumers they target. And why would companies pay spammers huge fees? Quite simply put - it works. From junk mail in your home or business mailbox, to unsolicited offers in your email, to comments on your blog and even SMS to your phone, direct marketing, i.e., SPAM produces enough of a return and revenue that the costs of doing business are covered.
Consider the words of the first and highest profile commercial spammer on Usenet from almost 14 years ago. The Green Card Lawyers, Lawrence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel tell us why they would do it again.
There were probably somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 flames that we received but they were not from 20,000 to 25,000 people. There were individuals who sent us hundreds and thousands. There was one guy who sent us close to 1,000 a day. As far as the positive responses, we did get slightly over 1,000 paying clients out of it.
October 16, 1994 the New York Times featured Canter and Siegel and the business their spam campaign created. The rewards weren’t simply tied to an increase in their immigration law practice, but included a book and a list of new consulting clients.
Their action, called “spamming” in Internet slang, set off a five alarm outbreak of nasty electronic responses, accusing the Phoenix couple of violating the global network’s code of behavior and self-enforced ban on widespread advertising.
The episode forced a debate about commercialism and free speech on the global computer network, which is not governed by any single regulating body. It also earned the pair, who are married, $100,000 in new legal business.
Abandoning their law careers, Mr. Canter and Ms. Siegel formed a consulting company to help businesses and individuals market on the Internet and written a book that details the process. “How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway”….
The creation of businesses to market to SMS and monetize SPAM is only possible, because as spammers will tell you - some people bite. A 2003 report, SPAM - The current state from Andrew Leung of Telus, a Canadian telco, presents the economics of spam. The article claims that spammers have lucrative careers on a response rate of about .005 %. That is, 50 people out of a million are sufficient numbers to justify annoying the other 999,950 recipients and fund the business.
There are numerous efforts to combat SPAM from technological, to legal and even people powered. Having found its way onto every messaging platform including, email, SMS, IM and blogs, SPAM continues to expand and flourish. So long as the economics of spam are reasonable and those 50 people continue to respond and purchase we, 999,950 other people, will have to endure SPAM. If you have ever responded to an SMS SPAM message, could you please stop doing that? You’re teaching spammers to continue, funding their campaigns and annoying allot of the rest of us in the process.
Oh! And, I like turtles. 
by Debi Jones
June 14, 2007 at 8:35 pm · Filed under News, ARPU, mobile data statistics
Chetan Sharma, a contributor to this blog, releases a robust quarterly report on the US Wireless Data Market that is a must read for everyone following or writing about the industry. His most recent report covers Q107, although, I’m sure he’s got a Q2 report on deck. I’ll include a few highlights from the report below to whet your appetite for the whole story found here.
US wireless data market continues to grow at a steady pace offsetting any decline in voice revenues. Growth in both enterprise and consumer segments resulted in a $5B quarter for the industry (by comparison, in 2004, the total data revenues for the year were $4.6B). Given that approximately 60% of the revenues are from non-SMS applications and the subscriber penetration of data services is still low, we remain bullish on the US data market.
- US wireless data market got over the $5B mark in service revenues in any given quarter for the first time. Revenues jumped 12% from Q406 and over 68% from Q106 to approximately $5.5B for Q107.
- Overall ARPU remained at the same levels as Q106 and Q406, which speaks to the value of data revenues in the declining voice revenue market. While voice ARPU declined 6%, data ARPU rose 46% compared to Q106. The average data ARPU in the US stands at $8.34 or almost 16% of the service revenues.
Though the overall penetration of messaging is around 40%, in terms of total number of messages in the network, US had another blockbuster quarter. Verizon with 22.75B, T-Mobile with 16B, and AT&T with 14.23B messages (SMS and Multimedia messaging) were the leaders. Notice T-Mobile’s performance with less than half the number of subscribers compared to its peers.
- US wireless carriers maintained their strong showing vis-Ã -vis their peers worldwide. Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint maintained their ranking # 4, 5, and 6 respectively, amongst the top 10 operators worldwide in terms of total wireless data revenue generated for Q107. US is the only country with 3 operators who generated $1.4B or more in data revenues in the quarter.
- For the third straight quarter- TMO US outperformed its parent TMO Germany.
If you prefer a more global view of the wireless data market, check out Chetan’s Global Wireless Data Market Update 2006. Highlights include:
- Japan led the way with almost $20B in annual mobile data revenues. US and China were next with $15.8B and $9.2B respectively.
- NTT DoCoMo became the first carrier to cross the $10B barrier for a given calendar year amassing $10.5B for 2006 in data revenues. The Japanese market was followed by China Mobile at $6.9B, KDDI at $6.6B, Verizon Wireless at $4.5B, and Cingular Wireless at $4.3B. They were followed by Sprint Nextel, SK Telecom, Softbank, O2 UK, and China Unicom to make up the top 10.
In 2006, SMS’s vice like grip on data revenues loosened a bit with many carriers seeing an increase in non-SMS data revenues. On an average, Japan and Korea have over 70-75% of their revenue coming from non-SMS data applications, US around 50-60%, and Western Europe around 30-40%.
