Dirty Aura

Search versus socializing

We don’t carry our mobile phones for a search of information, but to communicate with people.

It seems that Facebook has become one of the major drivers for growth of mobile internet usage. It was last year when mobile operator ads in London Tube started to highlight Facebook instead of Google search as a reason to use mobile internet. During 2009 Facebook’s mobile usage has grown from 20 million to 65 million monthly active users.

Google has reported 5-fold mobile search volume growth during the last two years. In contrast, if Facebook’s mobile usage continued it’s stellar growth, Facebook would have 420 million mobile users at the end of 2010, 23-fold increase in two years. Of course, this won’t happen. Growth has to slow down, as the total amount of Facebook users just flew past 325 million monthly actives.

Facebook Mobile Usage by Platform

It’s interesting to see if Facebook’s mobile usage gives any
insights about internet use on different mobile platforms. Following
graph shows above mentioned 65 million active users, split by the platform.

The highest bar of 27M users is shared between Facebook’s two mobile-optimized web interfaces (m.facebook.com – the standard mobile-optimized site and x.facebook.com for touch-enabled phones) and a few platforms that doesn’t show up as a separate apps, mainly Nokia’s S60 and Windows Mobile.

Facebook for iPhone has over 16M monthly active users, a formiddable number as it means that about 30% of all iPhone and iPod Touch owners (56M) use the application actively. iPhone-owning Facebook users starts to be an interesting market segment of it’s own.

Facebook for Blackberry has about 10M monthly active users. Given that there are about 50 million Blackberries sold, 20% of penetration of Facebook app tells about a thriving mobile platform.

The Java-based Facebook Mobile has around 10 million monthly actives – a small number of over 1 billion Java-enabled phones, but it’s still one of the most downloaded Java applications ever. GetJar reports about 20 million downloads in total for it. In comparison the other top applications, super-popular chat and browser apps eBuddy, Opera Mini and mig33 are around 30M, 22M and 17M downloads, respectively.

Use of Facebook for Android is ridiculously small, under 10000 monthly actives. I haven’t tried the application myself, but I’ve got the impression that it’s rather limited compared to other implementations. Am I correct assuming that Android users typically use Facebook via Android’s web browser? Or are third-party apps like Asurion’s Addressbook popular?

It would be the most interesting to see how the highest bar is further split between mobile web interfaces and Nokia and Windows Mobile. Unfortunately both QuantCast and Compete report suspiciously low numbers of monthly unique visitors for m.facebook.com (between 300K and 1.2M) and x.facebook.com (between 100K and 200K) so further analysis would likely to be incorrect.

Part 2: The future of Facebook Mobile

This introduction to Facebook Mobile stats was the first part of my look into Facebook Mobile. I’m going to post my thoughts about the future of Facebook Mobile and mobile web soon. So if you are interested on the topic, please subscribe to my blog feed here or follow me on Twitter here.

Mobile blackberry, facebook, iPhone, JavaME, stats

A short followup to my previous analysis of AdMob’s data. AdMob released a December 2008 report and it contains a fascinating data point: iPod Touch requests doubled overnight on Christmas. Worldwide there were 3.4 times more monthly requests and for example in UK requests grew to 4-fold compared to November. iPhone OS devices hold Top 2 positions in UK now. In November Nokia’s N95 was still the number 1 device in UK.

It would be interesting to see an analysis on reasons why people buy Touch. Do they buy iPod Touch first and foremost as a music device or do they see it as an internet device?

An updated graph of manufacturer shares is below. Nothing new there, Apple’s stellar raise of share continues.  It should be noted that AdMob has been running an iPhone focused campaign for advertisers, which is likely to skew stats towards iPhone. However they probably have business reasons for this. Maybe more ads are viewed and clicked on iPhone than on other platforms?

Mobile iPhone, Mobile, stats

There are precious few public numbers about actual internet usage of different mobile devices although this information is valuable for businesses developing mobile internet applications and web sites. For example many site owners have noticed iPhone’s importance and Google representative revealed shocking effect of this iPhone phenomenon, but there aren’t much public stats out there to prove it.

Fortunately, a mobile ad provider AdMob releases monthly reports that contain device statistics and other juicy tidbits of information about ads they have served. AdMob serves ads for over 6000 mobile web sites around the globe.

What is interesting is that this data is about real worldwide mobile internet usage. It’s not sales numbers of internet capable models that don’t really tell how people use their phones. Although it’s heavily skewed, it’s also not limited only to a specific geographic region or a single site. This kind of data is scarcely publicly available outside of big internet companies thus big kudos goes to AdMob for making it available.

iPhone is growing fast

I compiled the below graph of trends in manufacturer shares of mobile internet traffic from AdMob’s reports to investigate how iPhone fares currently. The graph gives further proof  of iPhone becoming a formidable player in mobile internet despite a lower amount of sold units than many competitors.

The real share of S60 3rd edition

Personally, I’m most interested in comparing different mobile operating systems and how people use internet on them. Unfortunately Symbian-based OSes are usually lumped together, although in a native development it’s a considerable development effort to support both S60 2nd edition and  S60 3rd edition phones. For this reason, I examined AdMob’s top device charts.

In a worldwide top 20 devices, there are three S60 2nd ed. devices. I knew that 5 year old Nokia 6600 had been a hit for several years in many countries, but I was surprised to see it still in top 20. All in all, S60 3rd ed devices account for 37% of Nokia devices in top 20. Using 40% as a crude estimate for 3rd ed. devices gives 13% share of worldwide mobile internet traffic is originating from S60 3rd ed. devices. That’s a very different impression than a quick look would give (In AdMob’s reports the overall share of Symbian of smartphone originated requests is 49%). It is also in line with illustrative math games that I gave in my Slush talk in last November.

If you study reports carefully, you can’t miss the small share that Windows Mobile has. According to July 08 report HTC devices account almost half of Windows Mobile usage. Using that as an estimate makes Windows Mobile’s share max. 4% of all traffic in November 08. That’s especially poor given that AdMob’s stats are skewed somewhat towards US market. This unimportance of Windows Mobile as a mobile platform was earlier pointed out and analyzed by Russell Buckley (via Tero Lehto).

It will be interesting to follow how Android fares during spring. November 08 report shows already 2% share in US traffic. Another interesting perspective is to keep eye on the importance of mobile web in Asian and Latin American countries. For example, I’ve personally witnessed Indonesians as heavy SMS users in Jaiku and they are also one of the biggest user groups in the virtual mobile world Mini Friday (the little brother of Habbo Hotel). AdMob’s October 08 report reveals that iPhone is a dominating player in two huge Latin American markets: Mexico (25.0%) and Brazil (31.8%).

Shortcomings of AdMob’s data

To understand how skewed AdMob’s data is it’s informative to inspect other changes in the graph. In May 2008, a big Indonesian advertiser joined AdMob network and we can see noticeable raise in Nokia’s share and a similar drop in BlackBerry maker RIM’s share. Indonesia is a strong market for Nokia (63.7% in Nov 08) and RIM is non-existent there. This just shows that AdMob network is still too small to give us a really representative sample.

Other fact worth noting is that Europe is clearly underrepresented in AdMob’s statistics. Following table, taken from November 08 report, shows geographic distribution of requests.  Africa on the other hand is overrepresented which is explained by AdMob’s strong foothold in South Africa.

Despite these shortcomings, I find AdMob’s data very valuable as it describes actual mobile internet usage. Let’s hope they keep publishing and improving it, after all it’s a great advertising strategy to offer this kind of valuable data for free when their main income is ad serving.

Mobile iPhone, Mobile, S60, stats, Windows Mobile