via: MobiThinking
Number crunching: USA is number one in mobile Web surfing… or is it?
The US was crowned top country for mobile Internet browsing last week by the press, as mobile analytics company Bango released its latest figures, overtaking the UK. But can we say with certainty that the US is number one and UK is number two?
It isn’t surprising that the press leaps on news like this. We’re all desperate for statistics. So data kindly provided by companies that are, or which claim to be top dog in their field is as good as it gets. This includes monthly data from Bango, the most commonly-used mobile analytics package, Opera Mini, the most popular mobile browser, and AdMob, the most extensive mobile advertising network.
These are all excellent resources, but do we do them a disservice by not reporting them in context? None claim to have visibility beyond what’s happening in its own world, and since none have dominant global market share, and their coverage focuses on their core geographical markets, should we map their figures onto the global mobile Internet as a whole?
The context for the Bango figures is: US visitors accounted for 29 percent of traffic and 57 percent of mobile transactions on mobile sites that use Bango analytics and payments. Until Bango has a perfect spread of clients across all geographies (i.e. as many sites in Asia and Latin America as the US and Europe), it’s difficult to state, with conviction, that the US is 29 percent of all global mobile traffic or 57 percent of all global mobile transactions. It may be true, but it sounds pretty incredible.
Similarly, AdMob’s Mobile Metrics Report only proves – the company discourages any other interpretation – that AdMob serves more mobile adverts to phones in the USA (43 percent of total requests), while Opera’s State of the Mobile Web proves Opera Mini is a more popular browser in Russia and Indonesia, than other countries. Draw your own conclusions from the tables below.
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