Posts tagged Mobile
The World is Not Quite Ready for Mobile Payments, According to MasterCard
May 8th
Is the world ready for mobile payments? Not quite, according to a global survey released by MasterCard yesterday. There are a variety of factors that lead will lead to mobile payments adoption across the planet, from infrastructure deployment to consumer willingness to make payments with a mobile device. The mobile payments revolution hasn’t arrived just yet, but if MasterCard can be believed, we are not far away.
MasterCard released the “MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index” (MPRI) to gauge the readiness of 34 countries across the globe for mobile payments. MasterCard defines mobile payments in three different categories: peer-to-peer, mobile commerce (mCommerce) and at the point of sale (POS).
Six different factors were weighted on a 0-100 scale:
- Consumer Readiness – MasterCard surveyed 1,000 consumers in each of the 34 markets to gauge their familiarity with mobile payment, willingness to use mobile payment and current usage of the three payment types.
- Environment – Economic, technological and demographic elements, such as Internet access and per-capita income.
- Financial Services – Depth of the financial services sector, including accessibility and affordability, and penetration of digital (plastic card-based) payments.
- Infrastructure – Mobile phone penetration, network coverage and breadth of NFC terminals.
- Mobile Commerce Clusters – Partnerships among financial services, telecommunications companies, governments and technology providers.
- Regulation – Structure and efficiency of each market’s legal and governmental bodies.
These six categories show MasterCard is doing its homework. The MPRI is the result of that homework. The results are mixed, but no country has hit what MasterCard identifies as the inflection point for mass mobile payments adoption, at 65 of 100 on the company’s scale. See the results below.
According to MasterCard’s white paper on the survey results, Singapore’s top ranking is based on its infrastructure. The country has 100% mobile coverage, 70% Internet penetration and 68% mobile phone penetration. It also leads in the regulation category with “well-developed laws in relation to information and communication technology.”
In North America, the U.S. and Canada are both above average on the index. The U.S. skews toward a younger demographic, with young, affluent males making up most of the mobile payments sector, especially in the POS sector. The U.S. rates above average on willingness to use mobile payments for POS and mCommerce.
MasterCard’s conclusion on mobile payments in the U.S.:
“While scoring quite well compared to other markets in terms of integration, there remains much work to be done in the United States. That’s one of the reasons mCommerce is so far ahead of other varieties of mobile payments: The infrastructure, especially as regards the roles and responsibilities of the players – is already in place. The existence of Isis and Google Wallet do much to boost the United States’ score; but until both these projects begin to achieve air speed by engaging all players, it’s still in the early days.”
The needs of mobile payments vary in scope between developed and emerging worlds. For instance, Kenya is No. 4 on MasterCard’s index despite having little infrastructure or mobile commerce clusters. Yet, it is precisely this lack of infrastructure that has led Kenya to be one of the most ready countries in the world for mobile payments because it is building a new transactional model almost from scratch. That kind of flexibility makes developing mobile payment systems easier. For instance, take a look at M-Pesa, a peer-to-peer mobile payments system that works without banks or financial services organizations (such as MasterCard). M-Pesa is administered through IBM for Vodafone, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. It is an example of how technology is used to fulfill a need (in this case, easy transactions) as opposed to artificially disrupting an entrenched market that will be slow to change.
That is where MasterCard and much of the financial ecosystem may be seeing mobile payments through rose-colored glasses. For instance, why do mobile payments skew heavily toward young males in developed countries? The answer, more or less, is because it is cool. The actual need for mobile payments (NFC or otherwise) is not as clear in the U.S. as it is in other countries, like Kenya and Singapore. Mobile commerce does well in the U.S. because the existing infrastructure is in place for it to succeed. It has robust carrier billing options, PayPal and other online payment processors, as well as retail destinations like Amazon, eBay and others. The need for a peer-to-peer payment system in the U.S. is a novelty, because money can be switched easily via bank transfers, checks or other means. As for POS integration, it remains to be seen how robust that market segment becomes as retailers and consumers decide whether NFC, beam technologies and/or QR codes really add more value to the transaction process.
MasterCard has identified what it will take to create a true mobile payments ecosystem in many countries across the world. What it fails to recognize is that none of this is a foregone conclusion. Reading MasterCard’s MPRI, you get the feeling that the payment processor wants mobile payments to become a worldwide reality. It identifies an MRPI score of 60 or more as the inflection point at which a country becomes ready for mass adoption of mobile payments. The question then becomes: Even if a country does hit that inflection point, will it actually develop a robust mobile payments system?
MasterCard presupposes that there is a distinct need for mobile payments. As we have seen, that already is a reality in places like Kenya. But in developed countries, mobile payments are not based on need, but rather on creating extra value for the consumer. Whether mobile payments will deliver an easy, seamless ecosystem that creates that kind of value (such as deals, offers and data) remains to be seen.
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What Facebook May Do With Glancee, its Latest Mobile Acquisition
May 6th
Over the weekend Facebook bought another mobile social app, this time a product called Glancee. One of the leading apps in a very new category known as “ambient location,” Glancee and its main competitor Highlight were the most talked about apps at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference in March. Highlight won the popularity contest amongst mobile phone toting hipsters at SXSW and it now has the most users of the two. However, as I discovered when I interviewed Glancee co-founder Andrea Vaccari at SXSW, Glancee’s technology is superior – at least on the backend. And that is almost certainly what Facebook was after: Glancee’s technology and talent.
So the big question is: what will Facebook do with Glancee?
This Ain’t Another Instagram
First, let’s put this acquisition into perspective. Facebook bought Instagram last month for $1 billion in cash and stock. But Instagram had 35 million users and was growing fast. Glancee is not on that level (and neither is Highlight). I confirmed with Glancee CEO Andrea Vaccari tonight that Glancee recently passed 30,000 downloads and it currently has about 20,000 users running the app in the background. Vaccari noted that the number of users who have conversations with others is lower.
So Facebook clearly didn’t buy Glancee because it viewed the company as a potential threat, which was the main reason for buying Instagram. This Glancee acquisition was about technology and talent. Although this wasn’t an “acqhire” either, the term for when a company is bought just to hire the people behind it. My understanding is that Facebook desired – and got – Glancee’s location engine as part of this deal.
What Glancee Does & How It’s Different To Foursquare
Glancee is a smartphone app that tells you when people with similar interests are in the same location as you. It’s different to Foursquare, which is about “checking in” to a place. Glancee doesn’t check you in. Instead it monitors your location in the background, using GPS signals, and alerts you to interesting people nearby.
In a nutshell, Foursquare is about places and Glancee is about the people in those places.
How does Glancee know which people nearby might interest you? It does this by connecting to Facebook and Twitter and mining the interest data on those networks (such as the things you have “liked” on Facebook and the topics you discuss on Twitter). It’s a complex app and hard to get right. Both Glancee and Highlight were plagued with technical issues at SXSW, in particular battery life drain in phones due to heavy GPS usage.
Ideas on How Facebook Will Use Glancee
Facebook doesn’t have a great track record with mobile location. Facebook Places, its attempt to mimic Foursquare‘s check-in functionality, was launched with great excitement in August 2010. However just a year later, Places was “phased out.” Four months later, Facebook acquired check in app Gowalla – another product that had benefited from SXSW hype. What’s more, like Glancee, Gowalla was a clear second to its main competitor (in this case, Foursquare). Facebook shut Gowalla down before the year was out and nothing has been heard from it since.
My bet is that Facebook will shutter Glancee too, but make use of the technology in a new mobile location product. Its primary focus is likely to be “social discovery” – a term Andrea Vaccari used when describing Glancee in our SXSW interview. Where Places failed for Facebook is that people didn’t manually check in enough at locations. One benefit of Glancee is that it removes the need to check in. Another benefit is that it mines Facebook and Twitter for interest data, which is then used to make social connections. This is something that Facebook is surely very interested in exploring, as it seeks new ways to tie social networking into mobile.
Another part of Glancee that likely appealed to Facebook is the time-based diary of who was at a location before you, a feature introduced to Glancee just before SXSW. The idea being that you could try and connect with someone next time at that location. Could this be a nice mobile-focused complement to Facebook’s own Timeline?
Glancee’s technology might also be used in Facebook Messenger, alongside the group messaging app that Facebook acquired last March: Beluga.
These are just some of the ideas that Facebook will be itching to experiment with, now that it has Glancee’s technology and talent on board. I think this was a very smart acquisition by Facebook. In fact, Glancee may end up being an absolute bargain if it can help Facebook unlock compelling new ways to network on mobile phones.
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Mobile Developers: Have a Business and Marketing Plan to Make Money
May 3rd
App stores are frustrating, cluttered places. Even with Apple’s prescreening process of every app that passes through its iOS gates, the App Store, it is often hard to find what you may want or need. This is a problem for consumers – but an even bigger problem for developers that often rely on these apps to make a living. For every successful app that makes millions for its publisher, there are thousands of apps that will not rise above the mess.
So, you are an app developer and you have figured out your next big idea. Dollar signs and millions of downloads float through your head, like so many sugar plum fairies. If you build it, users will come… or so the thought goes. But there is really a lot more to it than that.
“People still believe that if you build an app, they will come. They see the app stores as being the answer, and feel all they need to do is publish and watch the money roll in,” said Tom Emrich, principal at Toronto-based App Promo. “There is a lot of disillusion from the big winners that get the most press; this belief often causes them to focus on the idea, UI and code, so they forget that they need a plan and a strategy to be successful.”
There are plenty of apps that have succeeded by building a great service and spreading it through grassroots and word-of-mouth methods. For example, RunKeeper has never had much of a marketing presence, yet it is one of the most successful apps over the last four years. Granted, it also had a first-mover advantage in the App Store, but the company has been able to build a lasting business and platform well after its initial rush of popularity.
The middle-class developer does not have the advantages of being a first mover that establishes a market segment, or the financial wherewithal to wait for grassroots acceptance and word-of-mouth to take effect. Developers need to make money so that they can keep developing and earn a living. Monetization of apps is more than just deciding whether it should be free or paid, or have advertising or in-app purchases. Those are avenues of payment. But if nobody is actually using your app, those avenues do not matter.
From the beginning of production, developers need to think about strategy. Who is your target audience? How can you reach that target audience? Once you have people in the door, how do you get them to spend money? Unless you are a hobbyist, apps are a business and should be treated as such.
“Most of the individuals that are creating apps either come from code or just have an idea and so aren’t used to creating business plans, revenue projections, etc.,” Emrich said. “So even if they know what they need to do, they don’t usually know where to start.”
These are questions that small businesses have asked themselves for generations; they are fundamental tenets of business. What are most app publishers if not small businesses? They may not be your traditional Main Street small business, but the basic concepts of economics still apply. The difference for app developers is that the ceiling for success is much higher than a traditional small business. A successful app can create millions in revenue.
“At the end of the day, there has been a lack of emphasis in the app community’s conversation on the fact that what we are creating are products and business,” said Emrich. “You wouldn’t take $100,000 and open a coffee shop tomorrow in your neighborhood without a plan and marketing, would you?”
In talking with several venture capitalists, we have seen a trend emerge with how many consumer app developers (as opposed to business-to-business developers) approach their ideas and projects. One VC says that “consumer developers often are just scratching an itch.” They have an idea and want to build it. Building things is fun, especially if you have the talent to pull it off. But building without a plan is not a recipe for success.
Every decision a developer makes from the very beginning should be focused on how to get an app into the hands of consumers that will ultimately provide revenue. Monetization is a consequence of good decisions, not skill or luck. Appcelerator and IDC took a deep look at this in a Q4 2011 survey of mobile developers in the fourth quarter of 2011. The path to revenue is reach that turns into engagement that turns into loyalty.
Reach includes discovery across multiple platforms. Engagement is creating a unique and intuitive user interface that can be coordinated with marketing (analytics) and social plans. Loyalty is created through relevance and understanding your users (analytics again). When all of that is in place, then you find that the app monetizes itself if you have the proper avenues already in place or ready to launch.
As we can see, there is a path. That path needs to be figured out early in the development cycle, because it is not something that can be thrown together ad hoc.
“I see people throwing into paymium games which do not have an effective in-app purchase strategy. In-app purchases cannot be retrofitted. Freemium game play has to be built in from the beginning,” Adam Telfer, VP of game development at Toronto-based XMG Studio told ReadWriteMobile recently.
Developers: Are you coming at your ideas with a business plan in hand? Or are you trusting to providence that the great idea you have will generate the millions of dollars you dream about? Let us know in the comments.
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Advertising Your Mobile Apps on Google Just Got a Whole Lot Easier
May 2nd
If you’re advertising mobile apps, it just got a lot easier to position your apps in front of active searchers. Not only did your marketing reach expand, but you can more easily track downloads. Here’s a rundown of Google’s new mobile ad options.
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SEO Company India Launches Mobile App Development – PR Web (press release)
May 1st
 Entrepreneur |
SEO Company India Launches Mobile App Development
PR Web (press release) Profit By Search has since its inception, been regarded for developing software and SEO techniques that have helped law firms, small businesses, and other professional entities significantly increase their presence online. One of the premier companies … Free SEO Scorecard Helps Small Businesses Avoid Costly Website Mistakes That … 5 Tools to Take Your SEO to the Next Level SEO Specialist Launches SEO Training Courses |
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Social Apps Pass Games for Top Spot on Mobile Devices
May 1st
Mobile gaming has been one of the primary drivers of smartphone adoption over the past several years. Thanks to huge hits like Angry Birds, games have long ruled the top of the charts for mobile usage.
Not anymore. In April, for the first time in 40 months, social-networking apps have overtaken games in mobile analytics company Flurry’s monthly usage tracking.
In terms of time spent with mobile apps per day, games and social networking are now tied at 24 minutes each (out of 77 minutes total that consumers spend with apps a day). That is a 10-minute increase for social-networking apps since the first quarter of 2011, when games devoured 25 minutes per day against just 15 for social networking. This is the first time since 2008 (when Flurry began tracking app usage) that any other app category has challenged games.
Flurry, in addition to being an analytics company, is also an ad company. Between March and April 2012, Flurry saw a huge jump in revenue created by social-networking apps. In March, games accounted for 35% of Flurry’s ad revenue created, against 25% for social-networking apps. In April, games held steady at 36%, but there was a huge jump for social networking, rising 12 percentage points to 37% overall. See the chart below:
Where did this increase come from? The major social-networking services – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Path, LinkedIn and Pinterest – do not have ad presences in their mobile apps. And Flurry’s analytics do not include social photo- and video-sharing apps, such as Instagram and Viddy, as social apps.
Flurry’s CEO Simon Khalaf told ReadWriteMobile that the growth is being driven by group messaging and dating apps. Overall, Flurry has about 200 social-networking apps in that category. Khalaf said that app sessions in the social-networking category grew 17% from the middle of February through April. In addition to increased user sessions, people are spending more time in the apps. As such, some of the social-networking apps have aggressively increased advertising.
At the same time, growth has stalled in both usage and revenue in mobile games (through Flurry, at least). Many consumers who have had smartphones for a while have already downloaded most of the games they are likely going to live with. Words With Friends, Angry Birds, Plants Vs. Zombies, Cut The Rope, Minecraft and, more recently, Draw Something are among the games dominating the mobile game landscape, making it very difficult for new competitors to enter the space and scale effectively.
“As we reach saturation for mobile gaming on a per-user basis (one consumer can play only so many free-to-play games), the Games category could start behaving more like a ‘zero-sum game’ from here on out, meaning that game companies would have to fight over a finite group of consumers in order to grow their businesses,” wrote Flurry’s Peter Farago in a blog post. “For one app to grow, it would have to take from its competitors.”
Many of these apps straddle the line between social networking and gaming. Words With Friends and Draw Something, for example, both have heavy mobile presences and are tied to Facebook’s social graph (not gaming). Social networking and gaming are not mutually exclusive, but Khalaf said that while in Flurry’s system an app could show up both listings, games are not shown in the social-networking category, even if they contain a social element.
Gaming Still Growing
It’s important to remember that mobile gaming is in no way decreasing; it is just holding steady in terms of average user time and revenue on Flurry’s network. Overall, like everything in mobile, games are growing like mad. In Q1 2011, Flurry tracked 30 billion application sessions; that same figure in Q1 2012 hit 110 billion. Games will continue to drive mobile adoption, and overall, there are still more gaming sessions than social networking on Flurry’s network. As Farago noted, “As long as the total iOS and Android installed base grows, all categories will continue to grow naturally.”
But several gaming executives we contacted recently noted that it is becoming more difficult to reel in the normal gamer than it used to be. Not all games are created equal. For one thing, there are now multiple different genres that draw completely different demographics. People who play games such as Words With Friends and Draw Something (social gaming) may not be interested in games such as Infinity Blade and Final Fantasy (hardcore gaming). Games such as Tiny Tower, Angry Birds or Contre Jour (casual gaming) appeal to yet another group. Game developers’ goal of breaking through the clutter is getting more difficult in all the categories.
On the other hand, the sub-level of social-networking apps still have a lot of room to grow. When we think “social,” most people assume Facebook and Twitter, but the entire category is much broader. Social-networking apps include group messaging and dating, as Khalaf mentioned, but also location-based apps such as Foursquare, Highlight and Glancee, and question-and-answer sites, as well.
It will be interesting to see if social-networking apps can maintain their momentum. Are dating sites and group messaging really on a continuous growth path, or are Flurry’s latest numbers a one-time anomaly spurred by Valentine’s Day in February, March Madness and other springtime activities? Farago thinks social networking’s rise is sustainable.
“Even with an influx of new consumers into the market,” Farago said, “the expected would-be casual gamers will be increasingly wooed away from games by compelling social networking and other apps. Going forward, the games category will have to look to innovate on mobile to maintain its dominance and growth.” If there’s another hit like Angry Birds, gaming could easily regain its spot at the top of the charts.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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DataPop CEO: Mobile Paid Search Traffic Is 50 Percent Or More In Some Categories
May 1st
I had a chance recently to speak to DataPop CEO Jason Lehmbeck. Before DataPop Lehmbeck was at Overture/Yahoo. DataPop is an agency/platform that specializes in “offer driven” search campaigns. I was talking to Lehmbeck about mobile search trends and what kinds of consumer response he was seeing to…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Why Mobile Content Is So Hard to Get Right
May 1st
As a foreign correspondent in London 10 years ago, my job was to unearth innovative new startups for my business magazine’s readers. I traveled across the Continent, from Helsinki to Milan, meeting entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and big company researchers to write about the next big thing.
In the summer of 2002, I attended a launch party for a startup demonstrating their nascent service at a swanky Haymarket bar. Upon walking in, there were printed instructions to visit one of the tables playing music and then navigate through a maze of confusing WAP mobile phone menus. What resulted was my phone magically telling me the name of the song playing in the room. The event was Shazam’s coming out party. It took almost 10 years for the music recognition app to truly gain widespread recognition but, for me, it was the first time I saw firsthand what was only possible with a mobile phone.
Ten years later, publishers are still plotting the best ways to engage readers on mobile devices.
The stakes are high. As technology continuously improves, the percent of content consumed from mobile devices increases. On average, 20% of sites’ content is now being consumed in mobile browsers. But, evolving technology platforms and consumption patterns makes it far more difficult to succeed on mobile than it is on desktop.
And the challenge of building a great mobile experience isn’t solved by simply ensuring the content displays in the right way in the right environment. The bigger challenge is to figure out how best to match the content and mission of that publisher with the unique properties associated with varied operating systems, devices, browser and app environments.
Different technology translates into different consumption patterns. For example, users are consuming content in very different ways in apps than they are on the mobile Web. Gaming and social apps account for 80% of all app activity. By comparison, those activities account for just 40 percent of time spent on the desktop. Mobile Web consumption more closely mirrors what people do at a desktop with news, utilities, entertainment and topic-specific content accounting for the bulk of activity. Most publishers are responding to the rapidly evolving technology landscape with a wait-and-see approach.
A brave few are experimenting early, and with promising results.
Food52 has tailored its approach to the screen size. Its iPhone app is focused on its Hotline, a forum for user questions and answers. To take advantage of the bigger screen and encourage users to take their iPads into the kitchen, Food52′s Holiday app included a variety of entertaining tips, such as step-by-step instructional videos on how to prepare a dry-brined turkey or Tuscan onion confit.
The logical first step for publishers into mobile publishing is to create a mobile-optimized site. SAY makes that easier with technology used by Remodelista that automatically resizes the page based on the screen size the content is being accessed from.
Still others are pushing the envelope even further. Kinfolk Magazine’s luminous iPad app complements its quarterly books about small gatherings by encouraging readers to experience the content in a way unique to a tablet device. Whether swiping down for a peek at an intimate dinner by a freezing lake or rearranging the layout and size of photos of a salty dinner of buttered clams and beer in Maritime Canada, readers have never been able to personalize content like this before.
This post was first published at SAY Daily. SAY Media is ReadWriteWeb’s parent company.
Phone photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Mobile App Marketers Get New Tools From AdWords
Apr 30th
Those marketing mobile applications via Google AdWords are getting some new weapons in their arsenal this week. Google has announced four new tools: a new Mobile App extension for AdWords, additional information to the click-to-download format, the ability to see Google Play stats in AdWords, and…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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How Mobile is Being Used in the Middle East
Apr 30th
Outside the United States and Western Europe and parts of Asia, mobile advertisers are just beginning to find their legs. Smartphone sales are popping internationally, and that is beginning to create entire new industries and market segments to be sliced and diced for analysis. In particular, mobile usage is rising dramatically in the Middle East. How are people using their smartphones in the cradle of civilization?
In the United States, advertisers have been using data to digest consumer behavior for decades. With the rise of mobile, an entirely new platform that advertising could be sent to had to be investigated, and the data junkies have gone to work in various places. In the Middle East, an ad company called Plus7 (owned by Clique Media) surveyed several thousand people across seven countries in the region to determine how they are using their mobile devices to access news and information.
The survey included six countries from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Egypt. The six GCC countries included the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. Many regions in these countries are extremely affluent, with wealth generated from oil production; these regions are ripe for mobile growth and the subsequent advertising that comes with it.
Some key takeaways from Plus7’s survey:
- The top uses of mobile in the Middle East were for access to news, information, social networks and email.
- More than half of respondents across the entire survey access mobile websites or apps once daily.
- The United Arab Emirates leads with the most app downloads, with more than 50% of respondents having more than 10 apps. About 49% of UAE respondents have no paid apps, with 27% having between one and five paid apps.
- More than half of respondents preferred to use cash on delivery as opposed to mobile phones tied to credit cards to make purchases.
In the largest and richest country in the region, Saudi Arabia, 47% of survey respondents had a mobile data plan. 53% of male respondents had a data plan, against 39% of women. Unlike the U.S., where mobile usage tends to spike in younger demographics, it was the older segments in Saudi Arabia that seem to be using mobile most, with 56% of 36- to 50-year-olds and 52% of respondents who were 51 or older having data plans.
In Saudi Arabia, 42% of respondents used mobile browsers for news and information, followed by 29% for applications. Fifty-three percent of respondents accessed mobile sites or apps “many times a day,” with usage again spiking in the eldest two age demographics. News and information was the primary use among respondents in Saudi Arabia, with 46% of men saying that was their most frequent destination. Women used social networking the most in Saudi Arabia, at 38% (against 34% for news). Sixty percent of respondents had downloaded more than 10 applications, with 65% of 25- to 35-year-olds leading the way.
We focus on Saudi Arabia because it is the bellwether for the region, as well as the country with the most survey respondents (1,692). Egypt had the next-largest group of respondents at 1,570 (see chart above).
More Egyptians have mobile data packages than Saudis, according to the survey. Fifty-seven percent of respondents had a data package, with plans spiking in the 25-35 years of age (60%) and 36-50 years of age (63%) demographics. Thirty-two percent of Egyptian respondents use applications against 45% who use mobile browsers, with 61% accessing either multiple times a day. News and information was by far the leading usage segment at 57%, followed by social networks (43%) and search (42%).
In the United Arab Emirates, the financial center of the Middle East and home to one of the richest cities in the world in Dubai, 56% of respondents had data packages. Access to the packages is broad: All age demographics from 19 years old and up were above 50%, with the 51+ segment leading the way at 64%. About 47% of respondents access apps or mobile websites multiple times a day, with news and information (45%), email (44%) and social networking (39%) leading the way.
The depth of data decreases with the other countries in the survey because of fewer respondents. The trend of older users having the most data plans is reversed in Oman, with 56% of the 19-24 age bracket against just 34% in the 36-50 segment. Fifty-five percent of respondents in Kuwait have a data package, also skewed towards the 19-24 demographic (78%) and heavily male (61%). Fewer people in Qatar have data packages (49%) with the 36- to 50-year-old demographic the highest at 59%. Bahrain’s data is likely irrelevant given the sample size (just 65 responses), but 57% of those did not have a data package, with 68% of women (out of 25 responses) owning one.
For those who do not have data packages, pre-paid mobile plans are the most likely method of accessing mobile websites and apps from a device. Pre-paid is not the norm in the United States and Western Europe, but much of the rest of the world’s mobile use centers around pre-paid plans. The ability to have a data package and a carrier contract is seen as a sign of market penetration and financial strength in a region.
In the U.S., we see surveys and data analysis like this all the time. Mobile marketing and advertising firms such as Apkudo and Millennial Media issue monthly reports about user trends and consumer behavior. As smartphone use grows in the Middle East, we will likely see much more rich behavioral data come from the region as mobile advertisers and analytics services mature.
It is important to note that the sample size for this survey was small, and respondents were found through advertising on mobile websites, applications and other means.
Lead image courtesy of Wikipedia. All other charts and images from Plus7 survey.
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