US and UK lead in mobile social networks
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The Nielsen group reports that a growing number of mobile users are using social networks on their mobile devices. The move to on-the-go social networking is providing companies opportunities to tap the mobile advertising market - Ads on SMS, Ads on mobile browser pages are beginning to flourish. Google recently announced integrating AdSense, AdMob and Millennial Media’s premium MBrand network as well as its Decktrade™ performance network to DoubleClick Mobile providing publishers with more liquidity for their inventory.
At the moment, most mobile advertising takes the form of text messages. But telecoms firms are also beginning to deliver ads to handsets alongside video clips, web pages, and music and game downloads, through mobiles that are nifty enough to permit such things. Forecasts are that the annual expenditure will reach $11.4 billion by 2011. Other analysts predict the market will be as big as $20 billion by then.
In the U.S., MySpace.com, the leading social networking site among PC users is also the most popular mobile Internet social networking site. The site logged 2.8 million unique mobile users in December 2007. Also in December, Facebook, which has the second largest audience among social networking sites, had 1.8 million unique mobile users. In contrast, Facebook led mobile social networking sites in the U.K. with 557,000 unique mobile users per month in Q1 2008, while MySpace followed with 211,000 unique mobile users. While Facebook and MySpace.com were also among the top social networking sites in other European countries during the first quarter of 2008, MSN’s Windows Live Spaces led in Italy (154,000 unique mobile users per month) and France (106,000), and ranked second in Germany (45,000) behind MySpace, which boasted 52,000 unique mobile users per month.
The findings were released by Nielsen Mobile, a service of The Nielsen Company, show that the U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking on a percentage basis — with the U.S. boasting comparable numbers.
Web site: http://www.nielsen.com/ , http://www.nielsenmobile.com/
