The New York Times has an article on mobile web use based on the findings of a survey by the Online Publishers Association (which we wrote about here) and compared it to some M:Metrics stats (which we noted here). The NYT writes that “studies commissioned by trade organizations are sometimes just disguised marketing exercises”, which is no doubt true, but it’s equally true that care needs to be taken when comparing different studies. The figure quoted by OPA is in response to the question “which statement best reflects your usage of the mobile internet?”, which doesn’t actually define for the responder what the mobile internet is. As the article notes, the percentage of people saying they use the mobile internet ranged from 34 percent in France to 54 percent in Britain. The M:Metrics figure quoted (3.2 percent for Germany) was only for people who were retrieved news and information. As it turns out, the OPA study has some figures which seem a lot larger, for example the figure given for accessing sports scores, news and highlights is 49 percent. Which seems pretty high, but it’s only talking about people who seek out that information on the internet, not the whole mobile user base.
There are problems with the OPA report, specifically that it doesn’t define a lot of its terms and some of its questions aren’t really time-specific — asking the responder if they’ve “surfed the mobile internet for …” could lead people to respond yes, even if they’d only done it once. To really understand surveys you need to go into exactly which questions were asked, and if that’s possible it’s actually better when surveys give very different results because you can see which question produced the most desired response, and hence the best approach to take.
Here is the PDF of the OPA survey, it provides some good info if you read the fine print at the bottom of the results, which gives the questions asked and exactly what is being measured.
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