Mobile Web usage is still a nascent activity, but comScore put out some data on the information-consumption habits of consumers in the U.S. The number of people who access news and information daily on their mobile phones doubled from 10.8 million in January, 2008 to 22.4 million in January, 2009.
The second most popular mobile activity was social networking, with 9.3 million daily mobile users (although for some reason this number also includes blog access). While social networking is only half as popular as reading news, it is growing four times as fast, up from 1.8 million users a year ago.
An estimated 63 million people accessed news and information on their mobile phones at least once during the month. Of those, about a third did so via a downloaded application rather than a mobile browser, with the most popular downloaded app being maps. SMS-based search proved even more popular (with 14.1 million monthly users versus 8.2 million for downloaded maps.
Becuase design and user page is really good and fast. Thanks them.
This is really exciting – thanks for this story!
It is astounding that existing newsproviders seem to be focused on expense-reduction when all signs demonstrate that the market for news is not only exceptionally large but growing rapidly. Rather than cutting staff to free up funds to support legacy printing presses, news providers should be hiring staff to earn the profits that will flow from the increased demand for news.
Never before in history has news been so broadly consumed nor has it been in such great demand as it is today. There is money to be made here — vast quantities of it.
bob wyman
Hi Bob… Liked your comments on Techcrunch. I’m looking for people to do interviews on this same subject for CBS5 in Silicon Valley if you are in this region, would you be interested? Would need to do this ASAP.
Thanks,
Len
408 422-7537
I can even see this trend continuing upwards, with the new development of the smartphones getting more sophisticated. They are becoming little computers. I commute and i constantly reading news websites from my phone
This is an iPhone story – not mobile. I doubt that RIMM, Nokia, and Motorola have had any significant impact on habit change among their users.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Every new phone on the market seems to have internet access now.
It’s not surprising that many people use their phones to get their news rather than picking up a newspaper. It’s so much easier to browse through news articles and you don’t have to pay $2 for the New York Times.
Phones are the new computers.
My top 3 mobile news sites are facebook & nyt on the iphone and popurls mobile at http://i.popurls.mobi
Btw, does anyone know a recent article on the state of the .mobi domain?
This is really great information
thanks for this story
Eric,
I looked at the link you provided to the ComScore press release, and I think you are not interpreting the data correctly.
The data only shows the fastest growing categories, and then ranks the activities within that subset.
So it is not crrect that, as you write “The second most popular mobile activity was social networking”
Under your interpretation of the data in the comscore press release, this would mean that common activities such as checking mail and doing Google searches rank BELOW activities like trading stocks or doing online banking … which presumably would not make much sense.
Anjali Sen
Eric, I carefully analyzed your post and realized that it does not make much sense. Your assumptions are incorrect unlike mine, that are always valuable and appreciated by the most notable and learned Internet personalities, which, of course, I consider myself part of.
Please apply yourself. We need better articles here on Techcrunch. Greetings.
Anjali Sen
From India
I completely agree with your highness, Anjali Sen.
Greeting from Mumbai.
Please fail SBASB, so we can have TechCrunch back.
It is bound to happen. As someone above me already stated, phones are the new computers. Now if only they could start making them big enough to navigate the touch screens. That would be great. I’d pay extra for a bigger screen.
This is mixed news, at best. While the audience size is growing on the mobile deck, the infrastructure to monetize those eyeballs is still lagging. The one thing that seems to be getting the best traction is “Top 10″ (or whatever number you prefer) lists. Geo-tagged and interest-tagged news lists have a big future – we’re all so time-crunched these days that we just want there to be a very specific, very accurate way to just focus in on the items that we feel we need to know.
And then, of course, to click over to the piece on the latest starlet with an arrest warrant out on her.
Interesting, but wish comScore told us how much the mobile population (and not just news consumption) has grown year over year.
The URL for the comScore press release has changed to http://comscore...net_Usage_Grows. There are a lot of links to this press release around, so too bad for them that they’re not redirecting it. Come on, comScore! Cool URLs don’t change.