On The Mobile Web, Market Share Doesn't Matter
5 Oct 2010, 10:01 a.m.
Market analysts, commentators and pundits love to talk about the mobile web. Their opinions are often based on device market share data: hard measurements of product sales and consumer buying patterns. But for the mobile web, those are the wrong numbers to look at.
We can illustrate why by cross referencing data from the latest comScore market share report with recent Stats Counter web usage results:
| Platform | Total Market Share (%) | Smartphone Market Share (%) | Mobile Web Usage (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Symbian OS (Nokia) | 8.1 | * | 1.46 |
| iOS (iPhone) | 5.8 [1] | 24.2 | 25 [2] |
| RIM | 9.0 | 37.6 | 32.8 [3] |
| Android | 4.7 | 19.6 | 16.9 |
| Samsung (non-Android) | 23.4 [4] | * | 2.47 |
| webOS (Palm) | 1.1 | 4.6 | 1.33 |
| LG | 21.2 | * | < 1 |
(* indicates share is significantly below 5%.)
Mobile Web Up analysis based on public data from comScore, StatsCounter, QuantCast and GetJar.
These numbers tell us that total market share has little to do with how much people use a device to browse the mobile web. Some mobile platforms with low market share see very high mobile web use.
A much better predictor is smartphone market share. But even that is imperfect. With the iPhone, the percentages for smartphone market share, and for its share of total mobile web use, are roughly equal. But that measure overestimates the actual web usage for Blackberry (RIM) and Android.
For your own mobile web strategy, ask yourself what mobile platforms your market is using most to go online. Look at actual consumer behavior, as measured by mobile web use. This will be different depending on your business [5]. Ideally you will be able to leverage statistics from your existing web services.
One thing is certain: the mobile web will only become more important to your organization's success. From now on, EVERY year is “the year of the mobile web”!
