OCTOBER 5, 2009
Demographics evening out
As mobile Internet usage increases, men are losing their advantage in numbers. They still account for the majority of users, but women are catching up quickly.

Mobile Internet visitors were up 34% year over year to 56.9 million in July 2009, according to The Nielsen Company. Growth among women outpaced the average rate by some 9 percentage points. Men still made up 53% of the mobile Web audience in July.

What keeps men so attached to their mobile phones for Web browsing? They make up the bulk of the audience for tech, sports and news content—and, unsurprisingly, for men’s magazine Maxim. Fully 95% of the Gizmodo mobile audience is male, and men accounted for about nine in 10 mobile visitors to NBA and NFL sites in July.

Women, by contrast, embraced the mobile Web for access to celebrity news, shopping sites and social networks. Females outnumbered males in their mobile visits to sites such as People.com, AT&T search and Horoscope.com.

Teens, adults ages 25 to 34 and those ages 55 and older also adopted the mobile Internet faster than the average rate, but, especially in the case of teens and seniors, from a very small base. Takeup was slowest among young adults ages 18 to 24.

In July 2009, users ages 65 and older still made up only 3% of the total. Just 12% of mobile Web browsers were under age 18.

eMarketer, which includes both Web browsing and the use of mobile apps in its figures, estimates there will be 73.7 million mobile Internet users in the US in 2009, an increase of 26.3% over 2008.

JUNE 9, 2009

Look!

Applications for mobile devices date back to the 1990s, when Palm—by far the largest PDA player at the time—built an open platform that developers soon filled with thousands of applications. Users downloaded applications to PCs and synchronized them with their PDAs.

Enter the Apple App Store in July 2008.

“Apple did not invent either the model of aftermarket applications or the notion of building a store to house them,” says Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Mobile Applications: Moving Beyond Apple, “but it did succeed in radically improving an existing idea.”

Excitement over the iPhone and App Store transformed these functional utilities into full-blown consumer experiences. Apple and others in its wake have jolted the mobile advertising market and are paving the way for paid branded applications.

As a result of rising smartphone popularity, eMarketer projects that mobile Internet access will see significant gains over the next five years, with the number of mobile Internet users reaching 134 million in 2013.

Global economic forces are taking their toll on the mobile device market, but smartphones have been spared the ravages of the economic downturn.

Even in the face of a worldwide recession, the International Data Corporation (IDC) expects smartphone shipments to grow by 3.4% this year, and expand at triple the rate of feature phones in 2010.

This sales growth will dramatically reshape the device market. By 2013, Informa predicts smartphones will make up 38% of all handset sales worldwide, more than double their share in 2009.

“As integrated devices grow more sophisticated in functionality and more accessible in price, consumers are responding by upgrading their handsets,” says Mr. Elkin. “And once they have experienced the mobile Internet through improved browsers or installed applications, they appear unwilling to let it go.”

The size of the mobile applications market is something of a moving target, given how quickly app stores are proliferating and their catalogs growing. Piper Jaffray, one of few organizations to project the extent of the growth, estimates that combined spending on consumer and business mobile applications will top $13 billion worldwide by 2012, a nearly fivefold increase over 2009.

“It is increasingly evident that for many marketers, mobile applications constitute a necessary avenue for reaching and engaging with their customers, either by building and marketing a proprietary application or sponsoring a third-party app,” says Mr. Elkin. “In both cases, the essential challenge remains: to understand consumer behavior and craft experiences that not only resonate with a target audience but also integrate with other channels.”