Mobile Year in Review
Earlier this week, comScore’s annual review of the mobile market in 2010 arrived and contained some unique insight into this growing medium. The report primarily contrasted the markets in the US, Japan and Europe, which was represented by the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
A decade ago, text messaging was already culturally embedded in much of Europe while many North Americans still thought T9 was a strain of Tylenol. Fast forward to December 2010, and it’s interesting to see the US has leapfrogged Europe in some areas of mobile technology and leads them in mobile media consumption.
In the US, the number of mobile media users rose 7.6% to nearly half of all subscribers. Europe saw growth here, too, but still trailed the US with only 34% of subscribers using mobile media. A big reason for that is the US’s implementation of 3G (and 4g) technology and that they have nearly four times as many people on unlimited plans as Europe, which only has 8%. Japan still led the way with 75% of their subscribers connected to mobile media.
Stateside, there were more than 1000 products advertised by mobile content by Q3 of 2010, an increase of nearly 150% over the previous two years. With the mobile industry in constant evolution, and new devices, such as tablets, and mobile-specific publications being released, 2011 promises another big leap in mobile advertising.
So what does it all mean for Canada? Well, it’s reasonable to suggest we’ve seen similar growth in the mobile arena, but with important carrier and data package differences from the US, a better exploration is needed. We’ll dive deeper in a follow-up post.
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