MobileWebsiteWatch

Papa John’s Pizza, the country’s #3 pizza chain reported that its mobile web pizza ordering service had boosted sales by a staggering $1,000,000 since its launch only a half a year ago! Considering that its online sales have grown in total 75% over year end 2007, it is not surprising that mobile is such a big boost and that it is growing fast. Just another example of how mobile web is paramount to contining sales growth in a shrinking economy. Your customers are already mobile, if you cannot serve them in that space, a competitor will.

Gotta have that new smartphone!!!

In a recent study by ChangeWave Research, it was revealed that despite the economic downturn that has hurt companies both large and small, consumers remain bullish on smartphone purchases. Of those polled, 12% reported planning to buy a new smartphone as soon as 90 days!

The data continues the string of reports suggesting that the market for high-end mobile phones — which typically offer Internet access, music, video and application features — continues growing despite the economic climate. IDC reported similar findings in April, while Gartner saw continued strength in the market last month.

With many of the newest smartphones that users are eager to shell out big bucks for, such and the iPhone and Blackberry Storm, an unlimited mobile web data plan is REQUIRED for service on the device. That translates to no stopping in the increasing demand growth for mobile optimized web content for those hungry little babys!

Its no secret that American’s increasingly rely on their mobile devices for web access, and a new study by M:Metrics shows that they browse the web a lot, and the number is growing fast. Highlights of the report include:

• American smartphone owners browse mobile web an average of 4 hours 39 minutes per month. That’s a half a workday!
• About 11% of smartphone users have an unlimited data plan
• 9 out of the top 10 most popular smartphones in the USA offer a QWERTY keyboard, allowing robust interaction with all types of web functionalities on mobile.
• Sizable data pool used for highly accurate results, n=3500.

In a similar non-shocker, top domains included mostly web sites that offer sophisicated mobile optimized views, such as eBay and Facebook. This shoudl serve as a pretty strong indicator that mobile web optimization a must for getting in front of your customers when and where it counts most–connecting with them on a more intimate level via their mobile device whcih they use for business, shopping, and organizing their social lives.

According to a study realeased on the 4th by the Kelesy Group, about 19% of cellphone-owning

Smartphones offered by Verizon

Americans now have a smartphone and, shockingly, 49.2% plan on getting one within one year. The study goes on to disect the things people use the mobiel web for which include: searching for products, getting maps and directions, getting info about movies and entertainment and accessing social networking sites. All of these areas clocked in double digit growth year over year and with half the cell phone owners out there who plan on upgrading to a smartphone in 1 year, that should accellerate more in 2009.

As this surge of mobile users comes online, you can be almost certain that once they are shelling out for new phones with advanced data services, a seamless and successful mobile web experience on any company’s web site will pretty much be a basic customer expectation. As we’ve posted here, smart companies like Sears, Gamefly, American Airlines, and Victoria’s Secret have already implemented an optimized mobile web view of thier sites and are building up market share. Getting mobile should be top priority for anyone not yet there as everyday customers who try and interact with you on mobile are frustrated and lost.

In the Sears Mobile press release (from Women’s Wear Daily here), Sears mobile innovations team leader Thomas Emmons says it best:

“If you’re marketing to people who read 85 percent of their e-mails on a BlackBerry, and you don’t have a good mobile site, you’re losing that customer,”

Sears is a great example of mobile best practices and others will have to either follow suit or get out of the way.

In a study released this May by design agency AKQA and dotMobi, a lot of illuminating data is brought to light. While the overall tenor of the “study” is slightly muddied by the blatant commercial interests of its sponsors, there are nonetheless, over 2,000 respondents, fairly selected by independent third party research agency, Research Now. The study, which focuses on the US and UK, and is notable for highlighting the similarities and contrasting trends in the two nations, has its data broken down in many many ways. The free PDF download contains over 80 pages, most of which are charts or graphs about niched subject matter surrounding mobile web use. Below are few of the more enlightening points:

• Approximately 90% of the 2,000 respondents are interested in learning about the mobile Web, demonstrating a need for brands to make their mobile properties findable via mobile search, marketing and advertising campaigns.

• 50% of respondents were unaware that there are mobile sites optimized for use on mobile phones and;

• The vast majority - 86% of participants - said they were interested in knowing which sites are easily accessible on a mobile phone.

• Nearly 50% of respondents said that a poor experience on their initial use of the mobile Web made them “reluctant to access” either the site - or the Internet in general - on their mobile phones again.

• Only 2% of participants in the survey who have purchased a phone in the past six months chose an iPhone. This indicates that brands that don’t optimize their mobile services for a variety of mobile phones will provide a substandard mobile Internet experiences for a vast majority of consumers.

• Poor site display and layout remain top reasons for mobile Web dissatisfaction among consumers.

• Almost two-thirds of participants stated that they would consider purchasing theater tickets, take-out food and travel tickets via a mobile phone.

• Finally, 63% of survey respondents said they would be more likely to give up their money than their mobile “smart phone” if they were mugged.

People who report wanting to find mobile optimized sites

This study really showed a lot of things that are common misconceptions about the size and reach of the mobile internet today. For example, it is commonly though that the only people using the Internet on their phones are teens and young adults and an optimized mobile web experience will appeal most to them alone, yet this study finds that even in the higher age range brackets, the desire to know what is accessible from the user’s phone is remarkably high:

Chart showing interest in mobile Web sites broken down by age groups.

The take-away from survey graph like this is perhaps not immediately clear. While it is easy to see that interest in mobile web accessibility tilts more (although less than one might expect) toward the younger generations, the strong interest in accessing optimized content across all age groups really rives home an underlying, but indisputable and often overlooked fact: mobile users are a much more devoted and committed audience than desktop users.

Mobile users are purposeful internet users. They are not likely to be browsing idly and are by definition: on the go, needing information right away and, expecting to get it on their phone. Furthermore, there numbers are much higher than many think. This study concludes that, already, about 1 in 5 people access the Web on their mobile devices daily. However, if you add in all those who report using the mobile web at least weekly, you’re looking at more than 50% or users who access the internertt on their phones at least once a week!

Chart that details the habits of mobile internet use across all age groups.

If you’ve been reading avidly you’ll recall that in our previous post on Neilsen’s mobile web market report, it was revealed that there were 95 million mobile web subscribers in May 2008 in USA. So lets do some quick math here:

OK, so if AT LEAST this many users are browsing on their phones today and want optimized content, how many are your customers? More importantly, how many do you stand to lose to a competitor that does offer a mobile Web site.

Or best of all, how many do you stand to gain at your competitor’s expense by providing an optimized view of your Web site? Couple that with the year over year growth rate of mobile web use and the answers require less than back of the envelope arithmetic to become apparent.

The phone carrier cash cow that is SMS is still booming reports ABI Research. What’s more, the uses of SMS to increase the marketing and transactional reach of companies is going right through the roof with it. According to the study:

• SMS will continue to maintain its lead as the highest revenue generator across all messaging categories, providing global service revenues of $177 billion in 2013(projection)
• SMS to garner 83% of All Mobile Messaging Revenues through 2013(projection)

“Innovative companies are exploring opportunities for expanding mobile messaging access to Web sites as well as targeting customers with content and ads,” says principal analyst Dan Shey.

With more than half the world using mobile phones, mobile messaging is growing at an explosive pace and will continue to do so in the near future. Both entrenched companies and new entrants are providing applications that blur the lines between the traditional mobile messaging applications. New and improved hardware, software, and services are increasing customer choices while bringing down costs. Players in this market are constantly challenged to evolve and look for new revenue streams. The ABI study explores both supply and demand drivers pushing the use and functionality of mobile messaging applications . It examines demographic-specific drivers, and delves into the rising use of social networking sites, blogs, and Web 2.0 applications that are expanding to mobile phones.

Of course, SMS and the mobile web are heavily intertwined, and in a world of ever increasing customer mobility, overall productivity and sales boosts to companies will be achieved best by allowing the customer to interact with the service in anyway that suits them.

Nielsen Mobile reported today that the expected mobile traffic generated by the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing is forecast to break records of its own and be a “watershed moment” for the mobile media world.

According to their data, about 45% of U.S. mobile video users and 31% of U.K. cell phone viewers will tune in for the Olympic Games on their phones or PDAs.

“In general, the event-driven and around-the-clock nature of the Olympics make the next few weeks a really important testing ground for the state of mobile media,” said Nicholas Covey, director of insights for Nielsen Mobile, in the report.

NBC is leading mobile Olympics coverage with a range of offerings—although, strangely, there’s no mention of this on NBC’s mobile home page or on the NBC Mobile site. Instead, for the lowdown, go to www.nbcolympics.com/mobile on your desktop computer, or text OLYMPICS to 51515 with your cell phone. The actual mobile Web portal, accessible by cell phones, is at mobile.nbcolympics.com. More after the jump.

AT&T Wireless also has NBC Olympics 2Go, a mobile TV channel with live event coverage from NBC, the USA Network, MSNBC and CNBC. And NBC is distributing Olympics content through Helio, Verizon Wireless, Alltel, T-Mobile, and MobiTV.Certain events particularly lend themselves to mobile viewing. “Consumers are especially looking forward to the high-profile, short events such as track and field and gymnastics on their phone,” said Kanishka Agarwal, vice president of mobile media at Nielsen Mobile, in a statement. “Longer team sports, such as soccer and volleyball, are less conducive to mobile viewing, but mobile users will still follow the scores closely on their devices.”

Nothing has generated more buzz around mobile access than this event to date, and hopefully, but with such a large audience tuning in, it should be apparent that these 1st time mobile users will now join the rapidly growing ranks of sophisticated consumers expecting more and more information they can access right from their phones.

AT&T reports a surge in revenue, subscription and use of it mobile data networks last week. A few inescapable stats can be found below:

• All mobile internet use revenue was up by 52% in Q2 08 over same period last year
• Mobile revenue from mobile web browsing up 100% - while other services like SMS and e-mail were up 50%
• Number of subscribers with smart phones and active data plans up 225% over last year

The company had only been selling the new iPhone 3G for 2 weeks when these numbers were issued and so continued strong growth is to be expected. Sprint, Verizon, and others are expected to have similarly strong revenue growth in these areas despite a weak economy and other losses/write-off to acquisitions etc.

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.

In an IDC press release on Tuesday, it is reported that nearly a quarter of the world’s populations (1.4bn) will use the internet in 2008. According to the IDC’s Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast, the sheer volume of users accessing the Internet is changing as is the ways in which that access occurs. A few relevant points are listed below:

• Users will access the Internet through more than 1.5 billion devices worldwide in 2008, including PCs, mobile phones, and online videogame consoles. By 2012, the number of devices accessing the Internet will double to more than 3 billion, half of which will be mobile devices.

• Nearly half of all Internet users will make online purchases in 2008. By 2012, there will be more than 1 billion online buyers worldwide making business to consumer (B2C) transactions worth $1.2 trillion. Business to business (B2B) eCommerce will be ten times larger, totalling $12.4 trillion worldwide in 2012.

• Worldwide spending on Internet advertising will total $65.2 billion in 2008, which is nearly 10% of all ad spending across all media. This share is expected to reach 13.6% by 2011 as Internet ad spending grows to $106.6 billion worldwide.

• Roughly 40% of all Internet users worldwide currently have mobile Internet access. The number of mobile Internet users will reach 546 million in 2008, nearly twice as many as in 2006, and is forecast to surpass 1.5 billion worldwide in 2012.

• Among mobile Internet users, the most popular online activity is searching the Web.

When everyone knows that worldwide, that half of the internet users worldwide will be mobile in under five years, the benefits of getting a jump on the booming mobile web market is more than just obvious.