Five million Brits surf mobile Web

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 15 May 2007 at 14:59

A new study has revealed that 5.7 million people in the UK used a mobile device to access the Web during January 2007.

At the same time, 30 million people aged 15 or older accessed the Web from a PC, according to the survey by Telephia and comScore. It notes that the UK mobile web market is developing in parallel to the US, where 19 per cent of the 159 million PC Web users of a comparable age also accessed it from a mobile device.

The study found that mobile surfers tend to be young and male: 67 per cent were under 35 years old and 63 per cent were men.

'Similar to the Internet 10-15 years ago, men under the age of 35 are the early adopters of new technology and more likely to use mobile devices to access the mobile web than women or men aged over 35,' said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe.

'The mobile web is at an early state of development, but we expect usage to grow as phone performance improves, sites optimise their content for the small screen and operators fine tune their tariffs, enabling consumers to take full advantage of mobile phone capabilities, content and convenience.'

BBC, MSN Live, Yahoo, Google and Sky were the most popular cyber destinations in the UK. In the US, the Weather Channel proved to be the fourth most visited site, suggesting that it is not only the British who are obsessed with meteorology.

'The advantage that weather, sports and news sites have over other mobile websites is that they provide up-to-date information that consumers need quickly, anytime and anywhere,' said Kanishka Agarwal, VP of Mobile Media at Telephia. 'As a result, they are being forced to become user-friendly during the early stages of the mobile Web, or face the risk that competitors could steal a march on them.'

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