17 July 2008

A View into the European Mobile Market

ComScore recently held a webinar all about information gathered by M:Metrics - The Mobile Media Authority. One of our curious bigmouths attended the webinar and absorbed some very interesting information that we'd like to share. As a reference point, when 'Europe' is mentioned it refers to the top 5 countries only: Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the UK. Also, when mobile media is mentioned, this refers to browsing, downloading and application use.

First off we can see that Europe isn't falling too far behind the US at the moment, with around 224 million mobile users compared to 226 million in the US. Almost 25% of those European mobile users are mobile media users, not far behind the 30.2% in the US. Another interesting point the webinar highlighted was that 1 in 4 Europeans now have a 3G phone, recently helped along by the launch of the highly anticipated 3G iPhone, although the top 5 devices in terms of mobile media consumption in Europe consist of Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile phones.

Another noteworthy fact is the news that 13% of Europeans own a Smartphone - which is twice as many as the US - and Italy have the highest level of Smartphone users out of the lot. This has been just one of the helping factors for mobile browser consumption picking up significantly from the second half of 2007 onwards as Smartphone users 4 to 8 times more likely to engage in mobile media.

Mark Donovan, M:Metrics' Senior Analyst, commented that whereas in the past people would browse on their mobile to pass the time (waiting for a bus etc), we are now increasingly using our mobiles to browse for utility, looking up directions, checking the sports results and reading the news. When we go more deeply into the type of content being looked at when browsing, web search is right at the top followed by sports information. This just goes to show why using mobiles to surf has been such a hot topic recently.

When it comes to mobile search alone, there has been a lot of growth compared to last year - search is up by 36.5% in Europe and 54.3% in the US. The UK actually has the highest level of web search users in Europe, with over 3.5 million users accessing a search engine via their mobile browser in Q1 2008 compared to under 3 million in Q1 2007. Another interesting bite of search info is that, although Google is the top search option for both mobile and fixed, Yahoo! actually has a stronger presence in the mobile market than on the fixed internet.

This kind of information highlights the factors that companies need take on board concerning the mobile market in order to correctly target their marketing - especially when the mobile media audience has been found to be more receptive with around a third of mobile media users saying that they are interested in buying products they have seen advertised. Also an interesting point to note is that the lightest TV viewers are the heaviest mobile users and that mobile users are predominantly made up of the under 25 population. Seeing that the young and anti-media users are the hardest to reach, advertising directed at mobile users could be huge business.

Now that M:Metrics has been bought by ComScore, we now have a great opportunity to find out more about mobile users and their habits. Companies will still have to take great care when advertising however, as most people still see it as intrusive. This leads to innovative solutions from the top mobile advertisers many of whom are in the mobile content business and provide services such as ringtones and games. With 44% of social networking users using music and 37% using video (usually in the single digits for the average mobile user) this could be a key area to think about.

As time goes on, it will be very interesting to see how companies tackle advertising to their ever increasing market and how well users react to their tactics - here at bigmouthmedia we certainly expect to find ourselves reporting on up-and-coming developments in the mobile web world with increasing frequency as the market continues to develop.

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