Keitai

AdMob has provided the community with some statistics on global, mobile web usage. The handset stats are quite revealing of the market differences between North America, Europe and many of the emerging Asian and African economies.

First a bit of context. AdMob serves ads on mobile web and wap. Judging by the handset models on this list, there is likely a lot of wap and Opera/Opera Mini usage vs “full web” rendering browsers like Nokia’s (mind you the latest Opera Mini does a wonderful job of approximating the full web experience.) Either way, the sites serving these ads are mobile specific in some way or other. These users also have some sort of mobile data access.

So they are already fairly sophisticated users even though some of their devices first hit the shelves 3-4 years ago. (Note that old models may still be purchased new. In South East Asia there are still 6600 and 6680s on sale—and not just within emerging economies. Ironically, one of the few Nokia’s on sale in Canada is the 6680.) As for volume, AdMob serves about 1.5 million ads a month with visitors from over 160 countries. They do note however that their traffic is driven by publisher relationships and may skew accordingly. So while these statistics do not represent a definitive list of top handsets, they are nonetheless worth noting.

Ad Impressions by Country

1. USA (42%)
2. India (10%)
3. South Africa (6.9%)
4. UK (5.4%)
5. Indonesia (3.9%)

Not many surprises here, especially when you see the choice of handsets in the U.S. I assume the high data usage is driven by email applications and the perennial news, weather and sports (groan..) served to business professionals on the go. Key advertisers on AdMob include CBS News, ESPN, Coke, Geico, CoverGirl, EBay, MTV so it seems lots of mobile ad money is being poured into the already ad-rich US market where many services are highly partner and channel driven. (Does AdMob serve ads within walled gardens? I’m assuming yes.)

Top Handsets U.S.

1. Motorola RAZR V3 (7.1%)
2. Motorola KRZR K1c (6.3%)
3. RIM BlackBerry 8700 (5.5%)
4. RIM BlackBerry 8100 (4.3%)
5. Samsung I607 BlackJack (2.7%)
6. Samsung A900 (2.7%)
7. RIM BlackBerry 8830 (2.6%)
8. Sanyo SCP6600 (Katana) (2.4%)
9. Danger Sidekick II (1.8%)
10. LG LX550 (1.7%)

Let’s face it, the U.S. is pretty much skewed on the business professional data traffic side. Most of the above handsets are Blackberry imitators and the balance are either RAZRs or RAZR imitators. In North America where handset choices are limited, ‘cool’ businesspeople who don’t want/have no need for a Blackberry often carry a RAZR. Also—there is a conspicuous absence of Flash Lite enabled devices. The only possibility are the RAZR and KRZR which offer Flash Lite via over-the-air download on Verizon (with a circa 28% market share.) (Even then, the Verizon Flash Lite devices are specific to RAZR V3c or V3m and KRZR K1m—not sure if any of those are even included in the AdMob stats.)

Top Handsets India

1. Nokia 6030 (5.9%)
2. Nokia 6600 (5.9%)*
3. Nokia Opera for 6670 (5.4%)*
4. Nokia N70 (4.6%)*
5. Nokia N72 (3.3%)
6. Nokia 3230 (3.0%)*
7. Nokia 6630 (3.0%)*
8. Nokia 7610 (2.9%)*
9. Nokia 6233 (2.5%)*
10. Nokia N73 (2.4%)*

A few things of interest here—other than the obvious domination of Nokia. Sure Indian traffic is only 10% compared to the UK but there is a clear picture here (similar to what i’ve seen in Thailand) that the upgrade path can only go up. According to a recent Knowledge@Wharton article, by focusing on families of products around a given ‘platform (business, music etc.) "[Nokia] has created a ladder for consumers to climb from the low end to the middle end to the high end, while being fully assured that they will be with the mother brand Nokia."

Whether you believe this strategy is working or not, it’s easy to see the progression in the Nokia family of products. By comparison, what does an American Blackberry owner have to treat him/herself—a Blackberry Pearl?—an iPhone? With the US already at 77% mobile penetration (most of it post-pay) and India barely reaching 15%; the coming growth in India seems to point heavily towards higher data usage and (more importantly) much more focused consumers who know what they want from a device.

The potential consumer demographic in India is also worth noting. Visahl Gonda from Indiagames provided some interesting stats at last weeks Nokia Games Summit.

• The median age in India is currently 24—and is going down
• 72% of Indians are under age 35
• [This group of consumers] swears by the mobile phone and life revolves around friends and phone
• Spends more time online and mobile. TV viewing is going down.

India currently has some 200 million subscribers and adds 6 million to 7 million more each month—many will fall into the above group.

As for Flash Lite (see the *), I count 8 out of the 10 devices on the list above!

Top Handsets UK

1. Sony Ericsson K800i (5.7%)**
2. ZTE F866 (3.9%)
3. Sony Ericsson K610i (3.8%)*
4. Sony Ericsson W850i (3.5%)*
5. Sony Ericsson W810i (3.1%)*
6. Nokia N73 (2.6%)*
7. Nokia 6280 (2.3%)
8. NEC e616 (2.3%)
9. Nokia 6630 (2.1%)*
10. Nokia 6680 (2.0%)*

Overall this is a pretty strong list. The split between Ericsson and Nokia offers a good range of devices with decent (if not excellent) mobile web browsing out of the box. (And for those without a decent browser, the only two handsets not supporting Opera Mini or Opera Mobile from the list above are the NEC and ZTE–which incidentally are a bit odd to score so high. Can’t remember the last time I saw ones of these.)

Flash Lite doesn’t fare all that bad here either thanks to Sony Ericsson and Nokia. The only device i’m unsure of is the K800i**. The Sony Ericsson site strangely lists "Macromedia® Flash®" on the device spec but Adobe’s Device Central doesn’t list the handset as supported at all. So at the very least that makes 6 out of 10 Flash Lite devices on the list for the UK.

On the street, i’m also seeing considerable numbers of N95s which I suspect will trickle onto this list eventually. The (somewhat) unlimited data plans recently announced by Vodafone (ahem…) and the excellent T-Mobile Web n Walk will also probably begin to change these figures pretty soon.

All said, a nice reminder of how different our mobile markets can be. The AdMob Metrics also includes stats for South Africa which is a market I must admit I know little about. Also always worth looking at is AdMob’s Ad Monitor which uses Google Maps to display the location, operator and handset of ads being served in real-time. (I’d love to see them add information about the browser and type of site—was it WAP, HTML, Opera Mini, Nokia, Safari?)