Report: 63.2 Million In US Used Mobile News And Information; Mobile Social Networks Growing Fast

More people in the US are accessing the mobile internet, and accessing it more often according to figures released by comScore. The most commonly use of the mobile internet is for news and information: 63.2 million people signed on to the mobile internet to search this segment in January 2009, compared to 36.9 million people doing so in January 2008. The number of people who logged on daily grew even faster, more than doubling from 10.8 million in 2008 to 22.4 million in 2009. Apparently half of 18 to 34-year-old males used mobile news and information.

Unsurprisingly, the highest growth was in accessing social networking sites or blogs, with 9.3 million using the mobile internet daily to access a social network site or blog in January 2009 compared with 1.8 million in January 2008. That represents an annual growth of 427 percent. Other significant segments included: “Traded stocks or accessed financial account”, which grew by 188 percent to 3.3 million; “accessed movie information” which grew by 185 percent to 3.1 million; “accessed business directories” which grew by 161 percent to 2.4 million; and “accessed entertainment news”, which grew by 160 percent to 5.5 million.

Applications are also seeing strong take up: In January 22.3 million people accessed news and information via a downloaded applications, with 8.2 million people using downloaded maps applications. SMS is still a strong channel, with 32.4 million people using SMS to access news and information — including 14.1 million people using SMS for search. (release)

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