- Reach: Cell phone penetration is currently 89% of the US population. By way of comparison, this is better than penetration figures for cable TV, home internet access, and PC’s in the home.
- Acceptance: In the USA, over 102 billion text messages are sent each month, and over 1 trillion globally.
- Ubiquitous uptake: Mobile phones offer a reach never seen before by any other medium. Today there are more wireless mobile devices than televisions and computers combined.
- Globally There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (that’s 77 percent of the world population). What other medium offers that reach?
- Texting Nation: Of the 272 million US cell phones currently subscribed, over 96% of them are SMS capable. (CTIA 2010)
- Many mobile Web users are mobile-only, i.e. they do not, or very rarely use a desktop, laptop or tablet to access the Web. Mobile-only in India 59 percent, even in the US it’s over 25 percent of subscribers. Still think you don’t need a mobile site?
- High response rates: More than 5x as many people respond to mobile messages as compared to traditional, off-mobile call-to-action campaigns (94% of received text messages are read) 97% of consumers carry their phone at retail. (PMA 2010)
- Targeting: The mobile medium is an inherently intimate medium enabling highly targeted, one-to-one communication with audiences & lots of potential for personalization and up-selling.
- The Wireless Web: Over 3 billion targeted mobile ads are served every month.
- Widespread availability of unlimited data plansis critical to penetration of mobile media usage, it drove mobile media in Japan, now it’s driving the US with unlimited data plans starting at $25 per month
- Global: Europe is the most mature wireless market with (96%) penetration rates, followed by Japan (88%), the United States (89%) CTIA 2010
- Despite all the media hype, and vast sums pumped into developing and promoting native apps, more consumers use their browser than apps in developed nations. Only a minority will use Web or apps exclusively.
- Over 30% of visits to Facebook are Mobile, over 40% for twitter.
- In 2011 over 85 percent of new handsets will be able to access the mobile Web.
- Comscore (Febuary 2011) estimates that 80 percent of mobile subscribers in US and Western Europe have a phone that can access the mobile Web. 48 percent of US and 61 percent of W. Europeans have a handset with an HTML browser (this proportion is increasing fast), the rest have WAP browsers.
Learn more : Sources, ComScore.com , MobiThinking.com, CTIA.com, Gartner.com, Pewfoundation.com