MobileWebsiteWatch

According to the 2008 Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluent Survey (formerly Monroe Mendelsohn), the affleunet not only spend more time online per week, but also lead the way in use of the mobile web.  The report found that heads of households of affluent familys (defined as making $100,000/year or more) went online 26 times a week on a computer and 17.6 times per week on the cellphone. Overall, the spend an average of almost 24 hours a week online, constrain that to only people who make $250,000 or more, and the number jumps to 27.4 hours per week.

The study also found that the same trend applies to mobile devices. “While 40 percent of affluent households use hand-held devices to access the Internet, the percentage rises to 57 percent among those in the $250,000-plus bracket from 34 percent for those at the $100,000-149,999 level.“

The implications of this for the mobile web market as a whole is that since many web producers do not provide optimized content for mobile viewers, they are missing out on a lucrative slice of the market and will have to work double time to catch up.  Furthermore, due to this lack of mobile content, companies and providers that get in the hadset of those people sooner will benefit even more as their market share multiplies as the size of the mobile web market expands to like the internet and cell phone markets did.

The survey also found that about 10 percent of the affluent make Internet purchases using their cells or mobiles.

Remember, the study defines “the affluent” as a head of household of a household making $100K/year or more. That’s about 20% of all US households!  From there the math is strightforward.

In Nielsen’s recent study “Critical Mass: The Worldwide State of the Mobile Web” the numbers make it clear that mobile internet use has fully arrived in the US and its use is growing at an explosive rate. The paper is rich in statistics. Some of the highlights include:

• 254 million mobile phone subscribers in the US in May 2008.

  Mobile Web Users 2006-08

  

• Of those, 37% (95 million) pay for mobile internet access and use it at least once a month
• Of these, 40 million report using the mobile internet “actively”
• The number of US subscribers who paid for mobile Internet increased 28 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008 (from 74 million to 95 million)

Ø 40% of U.S. companies with annual revenue of $50 million or more offer mobile web sites, and an additional 22% plan to do so in the next 12 months, according to “Mobile Web Sites: Designing for Mobility,” a new report from JupiterResearch.

For 200 leading websites accessed on both PCs and phones, Nielsen reports that mobile traffic provides an average 13 percent lift on total audience over home PC traffic alone. That is to say, if a website is able to attract 100 visitors over the home PC, the traffic from mobile phones can add, on average, another 13 unique visitors to the site’s total cross-platform audience.