Analyst Speak: Growing mobile internet audience mirrors the early days of the web

25 June 2009

Over the last year, as sales of smartphones such as the iPhone have soared, we’ve seen the number of British adults who regularly use the internet via a mobile device increase by 1.5m, from 2.8m in May 2008 to 4.3m in May 2009, according to BMRB’s Internet Monitor. This is an increase of 52%, adding weight to the theory that after many false dawns we really are approaching the year of the mobile.

Social networking has been a key driver of people making more use of the mobile internet, undertaken by almost half (45%) of these regular users in the last six months - about the same number as use it for news (43%) and sport (41%). A third visit ecommerce sites and 16% have bought online through their mobile.

The mobile internet audience is currently quite different from the internet audience overall. It’s more dominated by men (65%) and under-35s (70%), but there’s no clear difference in terms of social grade, with 62% from the higher ABC1 social grades. Its size is similar to that of the internet audience back in 1997. This leads to comparisons with the way in which the online audience developed from there, broadening to be much more, if not completely, representative of the UK population as a whole. There’s evidence of the profile of mobile internet users broadening but not too rapidly - a year ago 71% of the audience were men and 73% were under 35. It was 2006 before the number of male and female internet users was fairly even.

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, mobile display advertising accounted for £14.2m in 2008 - half of all mobile ad spend. As well as the rapidly increasing audience size, helping advertisers to get a richer understanding of the mobile internet audience will grow this figure by enabling more effective advertising. For the vast majority of users, mobile access is complementary to internet use at home rather than a replacement. Only 6% use the internet on their mobiles without having access at home via a computer.

The categories the mobile internet audience is more likely to be active in reflect the skew towards young men: cars, alcohol, designer clothes, foreign holidays, gadgets and take-aways. It’s also an influential audience to reach in terms of onward promotion of messages being more likely to influence the opinions of others through word of mouth.

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