Smartphones will come of age as the primary venue for mobile Internet content in the U.S. this year. The proliferation of these devices will reshape the sector and force content companies, operators, and advertisers to retool.
Companies in the mobile advertising sector have been busy jumping on the Apple iPhone press bandwagon touting its substantial share of mobile ad impressions. Data from M:Metrics’ MobiLens service adds credence to these claims as the iPhone is now the second most popular device used to browse content, after Motorola’s ubiquitous Razr.
Lost in the hype surrounding the undeniable impact of the iPhone is the fact that smartphones – a category that includes devices from Apple, Research In Motion and Palm as well as handsets supporting Danger, Symbian or Windows platforms – likely now account for the majority of mobile traffic in the U.S. While these devices were used by only 5.8% of subscribers as a primary phone, this group accounted for about 26.1% of active mobile Web browsers in the fourth quarter of 2007. Based on conservative estimates for page views on smartphones compared with handsets with less capable WAP browsers asserting these devices already account for the majority of mobile Web page views is hardly a stretch.
20M smartphone users by year end
Users of smartphones as a primary handset in the U.S. expanded significantly in 2007, doubling to about 13.3 million in the fourth quarter. This group of smartphone owners can be expected to top the 20 million mark in 2008. The proliferation of these devices will reshape the mobile Web. Publishers of content will focus development resources on optimized mobile HTML sites and deemphasize xHTML and WAP development. Business resources will shift from a deep focus on operator deals to cross-platform promotion of mobile content.
Advertisers too will help propel the shift of dollars to development of mobile Web content for smartphones. Besides supporting higher production-value advertising creative smartphones provide an attractive target audience for many brands with a median household income that is about 57% higher than feature phones and a median age of about 36, five years younger than their feature phone counterparts. The market skews almost two thirds male as does the universe of mobile Web browsers.
A look at the top mobile domains on smartphones in the U.S. from M:Metrics’ MeterDirect service shows a mobile Internet very similar to that on the PC. No operator portals make it into the list of leading domains as brands such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., MSN, ESPN, Myspace, Wikipedia, and eBay Inc. define the medium. It is clear that mobile operators must expend at least as much effort on their smartphone interface as the have done on WAP portals. In this respect U.S. operators may learn from their counterparts across the pond as MeterDirect lists 02, Orange, 3, and Vodafone in the top ten mobile Internet brand-owners in the U.K.
As co-founder, chief product architect and senior analyst at M:Metrics, McAteer determines how services are shaped to match client needs. He is also the company’s primary evangelist.
