USA: Mobile Web's Reach Exceeds 74 Million

raindrops on spider web
Thanks to joka2000 for the picture.

Just how big is the mobile web? A recent mobile market report by comScore gives us the data to figure it out.

The bottom line: 74 Million American adults looked at a website in their mobile phone this past May 2010. Wow! And that number is growing every month.

Methodology

Let me explain how we calculated that number. (If you're not a fan of math, you may want to skip to the next section!)

comScore estimates there are 234 million Americans, aged 13 and up, who use a mobile phone as of May 2010. What percentage of those people looked at a website on their handheld?

According to the study, it's 31.9% for the 3-month period ending May. Based on industry trends (see this Morgan Stanley report for example), mobile web use has been increasing every month. So the usage in May is certainly higher than it was in April or March.

That means the actual percentage for May must be over 32%. But just to be completely safe let's assume 31.9%. That means conservatively, 74.65 MILLION Americans looked at a website on their mobile phone in May 2010.

14% Growth Since Last December

The fine folks at comScore did a similar study for December 2009. Using the same logic as above, we can estimate that 64 million Americans viewed a website on their mobile phone.

That's nearly a 14% growth in just 6 months! This is consistent with a prediction by Morgan Stanley: by 2015, half of the world's internet use will be on mobile devices. (See slide 8 of this report.)