Americans Browse 4.6 Hours Per Month on Smartphones

Partly because of social networking and internet commerce, US smartphone users spend an average of over 4.6 hours per month browsing the mobile web.
And British users do so nearly 2.5 hours per month, reports M:Metrics (via MarketingCharts).

For smartphone users Stateside, mobile browsing increased 89 percent year over year and pageviews have increased 127 percent, M:Metrics said.

Among the findings issued, based on March data from the measurement firm's metered smartphone panel:

Active mobile web users in the US spent an average of one hour and thirty-nine minutes in March browsing Craigslist on their smartphone, the longest duration of any site among the top 20 domains visited.

In the UK, Facebook commanded the most time spent browsing in the month. Visitors dedicated an average of one hour and forty-five minutes to the site, which also draws US users.

In the US, Facebook ranks fourth in time spent browsing, after eBay and MySpace, with Disney's Go.com rounding out the top five.

In the UK, the remaining top sites by browsing time are the mobile operator 3's portal, Sky TV, Microsoft's Live and BBC.

Each day they visited the site, UK Facebook users spent an average of about 19 minutes, compared with an average of 15 minutes for Microsoft Live visitors, 10 minutes for mobile operator 3's portal visitors, 14 minutes for Sky TV and nine minutes for BBC visitors.
In the United States, on the days they visited each site, consumers spent an average of 22 minutes on Craigslist, 29 minutes on eBay, 16 minutes on MySpace, 14 minutes on Facebook and 18 minutes on Go.com.

"Consumption is quickly evolving from brief transactions, such as checking the weather or flight status, to time-intensive interaction with mobile websites - even without an iPhone," said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics.

"A primary factor in the discrepancy in the duration of time spent browsing between British and American smartphone users is the relative popularity of flat-rate data plans in the United States, where 10.9 percent of users have an unlimited data plan versus only 2.3 percent in Britain," said Paul Goode, senior analyst, M:Metrics.

"Other factors to consider are the popularity of devices with QWERTY keyboards in the United States — where nine of the ten top smartphones are QWERTY, while the inverse in true in the UK — and the greater penetration of smartphones in the British market."

Source: MarketingVox

Mobile Search Used by 46MM Users in 3Q07

46.1 million mobile data users in the US used mobile search functions in the third quarter of 2007, according to a Nielsen Company report examining the mobile search behavior of wireless subscribers, reports MarketingCharts.

More than 5,700 mobile search users who use at least one mobile data service were surveyed for the Nielsen Mobile report. Among the findings:


The most popular form of mobile search among data users in Q3 2007 was 411 (18.1 million users), followed closely by SMS-based (text-message) searching, which was used by 14.1 million data users during the same period. Local listings were the leading search objective in terms of users (27.1 million data users searched for local listings in Q3 2007) Some 14.8 million also said they searched for information such as sports scores, news or weather, and nearly a quarter (11.3 million) said they searched for mobile content.

"As more mobile users turn to their phone for the answers they need, mobile search has quickly escalated as a critical part of the mobile media and advertising landscape," said Kanishka Agarwal, VP of Mobile Media for Nielsen Mobile.
"Knowing how mobile searchers find information - and what they're looking for - will help us intelligently engage with consumers through mobile search."

From a demographic perspective, Nielsen reports that among mobile data users…
Some 61 percent of 411 search users are female, while 60 percent of WAP (or mobile web) search users are male. SMS-based searching skews younger than other methods of search: 33 percent of SMS searchers are under 25. Within SMS search providers, Yahoo, YellowPages SMS and SuperPages SMS all over-index for Hispanic users.

About the report: Conducted by Nielsen Mobile, the Mobile Search Report sizes and characterizes the mobile search user market, examines the methods people use to search, compares usage across individual search providers and identifies the objectives people have when searching for information over their mobile phone.