U.S. mobile search usage has sky rocketed in the year to June 2008, growing a massive 68 percent to 20.8 million subscribers according to figures released by comScore M:Metrics this week. And the number of mobile search users in Western Europe has also jumped by 38 percent for the same period to 12.6 million.

These are encouraging figures for the industry, but perhaps more importantly for the long term viability of this market, users are searching on mobile more frequently mainly as a result of 3G penetration, smartphone uptake and the proliferation of flat rate data pricing. Andrew Hill, analyst at comScore pinpointed the key figures, “As we see the number of mobile search users increase, the frequency of activity is also growing. The number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50 percent in Europe, with France and Spain leading at a rate of 69 and 63 percent, respectively.”And the report also shows that Google are leading the race for mobile search supremacy with at least 60 percent of all mobile searchers in comScore countries including the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. This highlights that users perceive mobile as an extension to Web with search behaviour roughly mirroring that of online.

While these are the official figures, Peggy met with the company during CTIA and negotiated a deal to bring an extensive and – more importantly – exclusive knowledge resource to the MSG community. Watch this space for a regular feed of mobile statistics on search, advertising and more!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.