Mobile Consumption Doubles in 1 Year

Of the 63.2 million unique users who accessed news and information using a mobile device in January, 22.37 million did so on a daily basis. This 35% represents a 107% increase in the number of mobile users who access the mobile web on a daily basis from last year. These numbers from comScore show that not only are more mobile users accessing the Internet via mobile, a growing third of them are doing so on a regular, daily basis.

“The increase is driven, first, by widespread improvements and dissemination in technologies that have created better consumer experiences – 3G, smartphones – but also very capable high-end feature phones and, second, lots and lots of content and applications being provided by first-tier publishers and others,” said comcScore SVP of mobile, Mark Donovan.

Those who accessed the web using mobile devices on a weekly basis grew 87% from 10.31 million to 19.28 million, meaning that it’s not just a small group of early adopters. Monthly unique mobile web usage was up 71% from 36.87 million to 63.18 million since January of 2008.

What are mobile users doing?

Daily social network and blog traffic was up 427% from 1.76 million to 9.28 million.
Daily stock trading and financial account traffic was up 188% from 1.14 million to 3.27 million.
Daily access of movie info was up 185% from 1.08 million to 3.07 million.
Daily interest in business dirctories was up 161% from 939,000 to 2.45 million.
Access of entertainment news on a daily basis was up 160% from 2.1 million to 5.47 million.

While the popularity of iPhone apps and text searches and 22.3 million application downloads drives the increase in mobile Internet usage, 70% of this traffic is from regular phones rather than smartphones.

Get the full article here.

Facebook Increases Traffic, Losses Traction

According to a December 2008 report by comScore, Facebook, who had been trending upward as Blogger was trending flat, should have now surpassed Blogger for social media traffic. At the same time, Facebook fell behind SoMe competitor MySpace for actual user engagement. MySpace users spent an average of 90 minutes more on the site than did Facebook users. MySpace also continues to succeed in page views with 579 per user in January versus Facebook’s 337, the former showed a 10% increase in pages views compared to the later’s 3% increase.

How, one might ask, is this possible? Everyone knows that MySpae is for college dropouts and pedophiles and Facebook is for all of the beatiful smart people right? Actually, while Facebook may have begun as a SoNet for college students, it has quickly ecome populated with a varied audience, including non-college and business-minded types. Many of these are engaging withother social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter, dividing their attention. At the same time MySpace, which is most likely more attractive to users just now dipping their toes in social media, is seeing a less distracted crowd.

Any other theories on the shift?

See the numbers at TechCrunch.

Online Video Audiences: 34% Growth

According to ComScore online video growth has grown by 34%, with Google’s YouTube maintaining it’s lead of 40%.

Read More Here.