More than 25% of UK's population – some 16 million people – accessed the Internet from mobile phones in December. And what were they looking for? The GSMA Mobile Media Metrics, published for the first time on Friday, provide an insight: on the mobile internet, people want to know what their friends are up to - and perhaps do a bit of flirting.
Facebook has a clearly lead in GSMA's top 10 UK mobile internet sites, with 5 million unique users against 4.5 million for all of Google's sites. (Mobile internet users want answers, too.)
And the domination is much greater in terms of times spend online and page views. Facebook had 2.6bn page impressions - nearly three times as many as Google, and more than a third of the 6.7bn total. Nearly half the total minutes online in December were spent at Facebook Mobile - 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn, with Google on 400m in a very distant second place.
One fifth of UK mobile subscribers now tote smartphones, which is driving a rise in mobile interent use. In December, already 25% of UK's population or 16 million people accessed the internet from their mobile phones and viewed a total of 6.7bn pages.
Besides Facebook and Google, the sites of the mobile phone operators scored well, with spots three to five going to Telefonica Mobile Networks (owners of O2, with all those iPhone users), Orange Sites and Vodafone Group.
Finally, the BBC site on the seventh spot indicates that people are reading the news on the go. Breaking news is also available on the mobile networks' sites, and those of Microsoft and Yahoo at spots six and eight.
Regarding unique users, Apple's and Nokia's site come in last in the top 10 UK mobile internet sites in December. Once you look at page views and time spent online, Flirtomatic - which is integrated into most mobile operator portals - also comes into the picture.
Mobile minutes spent online:
1 Facebook 2.2 bn
2 Google 396m
3 Microsoft Sites 166m
4 Orange Sites 139m
5 AOL (and Bebo) 106m
6 Apple 104m
7 Vodafone 89m
8 BBC sites 84m
9 Flirtomatic 55m
10 Yahoo 49m
The GSMA Mobile Media Metrics report was commissioned by GSMA and comScore in partnership with five UK mobile operators: O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK. It is being audited by ABCe.
Richard Foan, managing director of ABCe, who also chairs the web media standards committee JICWEBS, called the new metrics "a great step forward for mobile media".
The figures are based on irreversibly anonymised mobile Internet usage data from all five UK mobile operators, collected with consent from a representative sample of mobile users. In addition, Wi-Fi traffic, not seen in the mobile network traffic, is captured in the server-side logs of media owners and ad networks.
