Sports and Weather Updates Drive U.K. Mobile Internet Growth

Mobile Internet usage in the U.K. grew 25 percent from Q2 to Q3, according to Nielsen’s Mobile Media View report, released today.

The research found that 7.3 million Britons are now accessing Internet content on the move. Though this is far less than the 36 million people making use of the PC-based web, mobile access is apparently growing at eight times the speed; wired Internet access grew only by a modest 3 percent in the same period.

The top mobile properties in Q3 were BBC News, Google Search, BBC Weather, Facebook, Hotmail, BBC Sport, eBay, Yahoo! Mail, Sky Sports, and Gmail.

Interestingly, BBC Weather, Sky Sports and Gmail all experienced greater U.K. audience reach via mobile than they do on the PC-based internet. BBC Weather receives 21 percent of all mobile consumers compared with 17 percent on the wired Web; Sky Sports reaches 11 percent of mobile surfers, compared to 8 percent of PC based surfers; Gmail gets 9 percent of mobile consumers, and 7 percent of PC-based ones. Kent Ferguson, Nielsen Senior Analyst attributed this to the fact that, “People often need fast, instant access to weather or sports news and mobile can obviously satisfy this, wherever they are.”

The report also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the mobile net is attracting a far younger audience. A quarter of mobile Internet users are aged between 15 and 24 years old, compared to 16 percent for PC-based consumers.