Mobile Marketing to drive doubling of mobile internet penetration by 2015

A NEW report by ABI Research, says the number of web-enabled mobile phones will double to make up 60 per cent of the market, or 3.8 billion phones, by 2015.

Given the global growth in mobile web access suggested by the report, mobile marketing will become a primary driver of growth in ad spend in both mature and emerging markets. 

This projection conflicts with the rather conservative one billion figure we reported earlier this week, but at ISM we’re a little bit sceptical that within five years, over half the world’s population will be using smart phones.

This new research does however reinforce the view that mobile web browsing will soon become the most common way of accessing the internet. This becomes even more accentuated in emerging markets where it is often easier to afford and maintain a phone than it is a computer.

The growth of mobile web browsers is following two trends, say ABI. Smart phones carry a fully-enabled web browser, while cheaper “enhanced” or “feature” phones use a proxy-based browser such as Opera Mini, which downloads highly compressed versions of web pages and as such requires far less memory and processing capacity.

While full internet browsers will overtake proxy-based browsers by next year, the less costly option still has strong appeal in emerging markets.

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