13% Reach Extension from Mobile Web, Says Nielsen

By Editor Wireless and Mobile News on May 2, 2008 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Nielsen Company today reported that mobile Internet extends the audience reach of many leading Internet sites by an average of 13 percent over home PC traffic alone. For some categories, such as weather and entertainment, the extended reach can be even greater.

The cross-platform insights come from TotalWeb, a new report from Nielsen that integrates data from Nielsen Mobile and Nielsen Online to show the unduplicated, unique audience for more than 200 leading Internet sites across the PC and mobile Internet space. Nielsen’s data show that for many Internet publishers, mobile Internet increases the overall size of their audience.

Nielsen released data that show - by category - how mobile traffic increases, or “lifts,” Internet audience levels. Weather sites get a strong lift from mobile, meaning there are people who access the sites over their phone but not over their home PC, while shopping sites have a mostly duplicated audience, meaning that mobile users who access shopping sites on their phone likely also do so over their home PC.

TotalWeb - Average Online Audience Lift Provided by Mobile Web, by Category (Q4 2007)
Category	Average Lift (%)
Total	13
Weather¹	22
Entertainment	22
Games	15
Music	15
Email	11
Sports	10
Business/Finance	4
Social Networking	3
Search	2
Shopping/Auctions	1
Source: TotalWeb Q4 2007, The Nielsen Company. Based on 200+ Internet sites measured across both Home PC and Mobile Internet. ¹To be read: In Q4 2007, weather sites measured by TotalWeb averaged a 22% lift in overall audience reach through mobile web traffic, over home PC traffic alone.

“The data demonstrate that the mobile Internet can not only increase the frequency of visits to a website, but also grow the overall size of the pie,” said Jeff Herrmann, Vice President of Mobile Media, Nielsen Mobile. “Publishers can now monetize their total cross-platform audience, and advertisers will better understand the efficiency and incremental value of mobile web traffic.”

According to Nielsen, 87 million U.S. mobile users subscribe to mobile Internet services, and more than one in ten mobile subscribers (13.7 percent) actively uses mobile Internet each month. TotalWeb integrates data from Nielsen Online and Nielsen Mobile to report how this growing segment uses both mobile devices and PCs to access the Web.

Nielsen collects TotalWeb data through a survey of active mobile Internet users in Nielsen Online’s MegaPanel, the world’s highest quality metered Internet panel. Members of the panel have their Internet access and behavior via mobile devices and PCs analyzed to provide site-level reporting of unique audience, active reach, unduplicated audience, audience overlap, and demographics across platforms.

“Unduplicated measurement of the total Internet audience will help AccuWeather.com show advertisers the value of our cross-platform audience,” said Dave Wrieden, Executive Director at AccuWeather.com, which received a 43 percent audience lift from mobile Internet users. “Nielsen’s TotalWeb service is the only product that gives us that number and so is an important advancement in Internet audience measurement.”

The TotalWeb report is available at www.nielsenmobile.com.