Over 80% of Nigeria's Facebook users access via mobile

"According to Socialbakers, the countries with the highest Facebook mobile penetration are:
Nigeria: 81.2 percent
Brunei: 80.8 percent
South Africa: 80.5 percent
Malawi: 78.3 percent
Papua New Guinea: 78.3 percent
Namibia: 76.7 percent
Botswana: 76.4 percent
Zambia: 73.9 percent
Japan: 72.1 percent
Singapore: 71.8 percent"
Source:  AllFacebook, 8th May 2012
Note - this means the number who access via mobile as a percent of the total users - but the people accessing via mobile may also access on a desktop device.

European Mobile Benchmarks February 2012

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Source:  Data from comScore for the 3 months to September 2011, reported in a press release, 26th April 2012

China has 365m mobile internet users

"According to a report on the state of development of China's mobile internet newly released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of the end of 2011, China's number of mobile internet users had reached 356 mln, an increase of 122 mln within one year. By the end of 2011, total smartphone users in China reached 190 mln, with daily mobile internet use per user at an average of 109 minutes a day. Most-used features included Tencent's (0700.HK) QQ instant messaging platform and other IM clients, as well as mobile search.
The proportion of smartphone users who surfed the internet over their phones multiple times a day was 60.2%, 13 percentage points more than the proportion of non-smartphone users who did the same. Although smartphone users were stickier in their use of the mobile internet, the average daily total time they spent surfing on their phones was not significantly greater than the time spent by non-smartphone users on theirs. Average total time spent online per day for smartphone users was 109 minutes, while average total time spent online per day for non-smartphone users was 106 minutes, a difference of only 2.9%.
In the second half of the past year, over 80% of mobile Internet users did not purchase mobile apps."

Source:  Beijing Evening News, via Marbridge Daily, 9th April 2012

'Non humans' account for over half of all web traffic

"By one study's measure, slightly more than half of all the Internet's traffic comes from computers not being used by fleshy humans that might actually purchase products.
That's according to study released today by Incapsula, an Internet security firm, begging the question: What exactly does Internet traffic from a "non-human" look like? Incapsula is here to explain: "hackers, spambots, scrapers and spies of sorts collecting proprietary business information and customer data from unsuspecting websites." "Hackers" (5 percent) refers to hacking software that visits site to swipe credit-card information or crash sites (think of the ubiquitous DDoS attacks). "Scrapers" (another 5 percent) refer to bots that copy content from other sites and post it on their own, to get search-engine traffic. Altogether, the robotic ne'er-do-wells cited above constitutes 31 percent of all web traffic. The other 20 percent is the search engines themselves, the Googles and Bings of the Interwebbed world, whose servers work 'round-the-clock to index the Internet for our browsing pleasure."

Source:  Atlantic Wire, 15th March 2012

86bn text messages were sent in China in January 2012

"China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has released its January 2012 telecom industry statistics. The figures for the month were as follows:
Telecom operating revenues were RMB 92.52 bln (USD 14.66 bln), up 15% YoY. Core services accounted for RMB 81.63 bln (USD 12.94 bln) of the total, up 12.2% YoY.
Total telephone subscribers saw a net increase of 9.94 mln in January to reach 1.281 bln. Mobile subscribers grew by 10.35 mln to 996.6 mln, and fixed-line subscribers dropped by 0.41 mln to 284.71 mln. Broken down by traditional fixed-line and PHS, the PHS subscriber base declined by 934,000 subs to 16.94 mln, while traditional (i.e. non-PHS) fixed-line subscribers increased by 525,000 to 267.77 mln. 8.18 mln new 3G subscribers were added in January to reach a total of 136.6 mln.
A total of 85.57 bln SMS messages were sent during the month of January, a 23.8% increase YoY."

Source:  Marbridge Daily, 13th March 2012

58m people accessed Facebook only my mobile in December 2011

"The company has revealed that, during December 2011, more than 58 million Facebook users accessed the social network using their mobile phone only. That’s right, more than 50 million people entered through the service a mobile app or (most likely) their mobile browser, without logging in through a PC at all during the month.
Though the number represents a mere 13 percent of the reported 432 million users that were active on a mobile at any point during the month, and even less of its entire 850 million plus userbase, it is a quite incredible statistic. Importantly, it is also one that will continue to rise for two main reasons."
Source:  TheNextWeb, 8th March 2012

There are 338m mobile internet users in China

"The follow are some of the numbers coming out of iResearch.  The Chinese mobile Internet market during 2011 reached 39.31 billion RMB.  This created a year to year growth rate of 97.5%.  This growth was supported mainly by the mobile value-added market and the rapidly growing mobile E-Commerce.  We expect mobile E-commerce to fully surpass mobile value-added sometime during 2012.  Mobile advertising, which saw a 101.7% growth in 2011 to 2.42 billion RMB, is another segment that will continue its track record during 2012 as adverstising on mobile is finally being wholeheartedly supported by advertisers..
With 338 million mobile Internet users in China during 2011, we should see the mobile Internet market continue its rocket ship climb this year as well – as long as Europe gets its act together.  If they don’t, we’ll still see very solid growth."

Source:  MobiSights, 7th February 2012

The internet in 2011

A whole slew of useful stats, including:
"2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.
922.2 million – Internet users in Asia.
476.2 million – Internet users in Europe.
271.1 million – Internet users in North America.
215.9 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
118.6 million – Internet users in Africa.
68.6 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
45% – Share of Internet users under the age of 25.
485 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
36.3% – Internet penetration in China.
591 million – Number of fixed (wired) broadband subscriptions worldwide."

Source:  Multiple, collected together by Pingdom, 17th January 2012

Lots more stats, all fully sourced, here

Devices used to access social networks in Europe, US and Australia

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Source:  Ofcom Consumer Research, October 2011.  Taken from the Ofcom International Communications Market Report, December 2011
Lots more data and charts in the full report here

European Mobile Benchmarks September 2011

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Source:  Data from comScore for the 3 months to September 2011, reported in a press release, 21st November 2011

Internet users & usage in Europe, September 2011

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Source:  Press release from comScore, 14th November 2011

2/3 of college students would rather have an internet connection than a car

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Source:  Taken from Cisco's World Technology Report, September 2011
Press release here
Methodology - 1,400 college students aged 18-23 & 1400 young professionals under 30.
The survey was translated into local languages and fielded in 14 countries to gain approximately
100 completes for each subgroup in each country
Countries: United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Italy,
Russia, India, China, Japan, Australia

Entertainment (e.g. Netflix) accounts for 60% of US web traffic at peak times

"Within fixed networks in the United States, Real-Time Entertainment applications are the primary drivers of network capacity requirements, accounting for 60% of peak downstream traffic, up from 50% in 2010. Rate-adaptive video represents the majority of video bandwidth, with Netflix alone representing 32.7% of peak downstream traffic, a relative increase of more than 10% since spring.
We have entered the “Post-PC Era”, as the majority of Real-Time Entertainment traffic (55%, by volume) is destined for game consoles, set-top boxes, smart TVs, and mobile devices being used in the home, with only 45% actually going to desktop and laptop computers over North American fixed networks.
Video in mobile networks continues to gain momentum.  In North America, Real-Time Entertainment is now 32.6% of peak downstream traffic, while in Asia Pacific it is 41.8%.  The largest contributor is YouTube, and other applications like peercasting PPStream and Netflix are making inroads.
Mobile Marketplace traffic accounts for 9.4% of peak downstream usage in APAC and 5.8% in North America, led in both cases by Apple and Google. Applications like Skype and WhatsApp Messenger, that replace the traditional revenue sources of voice and texting, are being installed by growing numbers of subscribers.
In North America on fixed networks, mean usage remained generally flat at the high end (22.7 GB from 23.0 GB reported in May) and median usage dropped to 5.8 GB from 7.0 GB. This shows that while subscribers aren’t using more traffic overall the usage gap between heavy and light users is broadening and that more data is being used during the small peak period window.  In Asia-Pacific fixed networks, median monthly usage is 17.7 GB, which is the largest we have observed."

Source:  Data from Sandvine, reported in a press release, 26th October 2011

Mary Meeker's Internet Trends October 2011

KPCB Internet Trends 2011

View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Over 70m Americans accessed social sites or blogs via mobile in August 2011

"comScore, Inc, a leader in measuring the digital world, today released results of a study on mobile social media usage based on data from its comScore MobiLens service, which showed that 72.2 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device in August 2011, an increase of 37 percent in the past year. The study also provided new insights into how mobile users interact with social media, finding that more than half read a post from an organization, brand or event while on their mobile device.
“Social media is one of the most popular and fastest growing mobile activities, reaching nearly one third of all U.S. mobile users,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president for mobile. “This behavior is even more prevalent among smartphone owners with three in five accessing social media each month, highlighting the importance of apps and the enhanced functionality of smartphones to social media usage on mobile devices.”
In August 2011, more than 72.2 million people accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device, an increase of 37 percent from the previous year. Nearly 40 million U.S. mobile users, more than half of the mobile social media audience, access these sites almost every day, demonstrating the importance of this activity to people’s daily routines.
Research also indicated that although more people accessed these sites via their mobile browser, the social networking app audience grew five times faster in the past year. While the mobile browsing social networking audience grew 24 percent to 42.3 million users in the past year, the mobile social networking app audience surged 126 percent to 38.5 million."

Source:  Press release from comScore, 20th October 2011

Smartphones & tablets accounted for 7% of all US web traffic in August 2011

"Smartphones and tablets — particularly the iPad — are becoming an increasingly significant source of web traffic in the U.S.
According to web analytics firm comScore, smartphones and tablets accounted for 6.8% of all web traffic in the U.S. in August.
Approximately two-thirds of that 6.8% came from mobile phones, while the remaining third came from tablet devices. The iPad dominated the latter category, accounting for 97.2% of tablet traffic.
The iPad is driving more web traffic than the iPhone, accounting for 46.8% of all traffic originating from iOS devices in August, compared to the iPhone’s 42.6% share. iOS’s total share of U.S. mobile web traffic in August was 58.5%."
Source:  Data from ComScore, reported by Mashable, 11th October 2011

18% of internet users access solely through a mobile connection

"Mobile is increasingly the primary platform for internet access, according to today’s Global Consumer Survey (GCS) report from MEF, the global community for mobile content and commerce.
Based on research conducted among over 8,000 respondents in nine countries across five continents, the MEF GCS found that 72% access the mobile internet on a daily basis with 18% no longer using fixed line internet access whatsoever. In each individual market, the number of consumers accessing the mobile internet daily is higher than the number accessing fixed-line internet."

Source:  Research by the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF)'s Global Consumer Survey, reported in a press release, 12th October 2011

See an extract here

The markets surveyed were:  Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, UK & US

There are 485m internet users in China

"The number of Internet surfers in China increased to an estimated 485 million as of the end of June 2011, according to the latest semiannual survey conducted by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
The number of Internet surfers rose 6.1% from half year ago and was equivalent to a user density or penetration rate (divided by population) of 36.2%, CNNIC indicated. Of the Internet surfers, 389.77 million used broadband fixed-line access modes (xDSL, cable modem, fiber-optic and dedicated line) at home and 317.68 million used handsets for mobile access. The average time spent using the Internet was 18.7 hours."

Source:  Data from the CNNIC, reported by DigiTimes, 12th August 2011

45% of British internet users sometimes connect through mobile

"Almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections, according to the Office for National Statistics.
45% of people surveyed said they made use of the net while out and about, compared with 31% in 2010.
The most rapid growth was among younger people, where 71% of internet-connected 16 to 24-year-olds used mobiles.
Domestic internet use also rose. According to the ONS, 77% of households now have access to a net connection.
That figure was up 4% from the previous year, representing the slowest rate of growth since the ONS survey began in 2006.
Among the 23% of the population who remain offline, half said they "didn't need the internet.""
Source:  Data from the Office of National Statistics, reported by BBC News, 31st August 2011

Internet Users & time spent by market in Europe, May 2011

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Source:  Press release from comScore Media Metrix, 6th July 2011