Posts Tagged ‘Nic Covey’

At yesterday’s OMMA Mobile conference, the ever-knowledgeable Nic Covey, director of insights at Nielsen Mobile, gave a preview of the company’s new Mobile AdRelevance database, MediaPost reports.

It’s essentially a mobile version of Nielsen Online’s online ad-tracking service AdRelevance. The new service “measures and ranks mobile Web sites based on the number of ad impressions they generate, and it shows the dominant player is the same as the wired Web: Yahoo.”

Covey said that Yahoo Games is the number one mobile destination, followed closely by Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News.

“The No. 1 destination in terms of total mobile Web traffic is Yahoo Mail, followed by Google Search, The Weather Channel, Gmail, MSN Hotmail, and Google Maps,” according to the report. Lots of good data in this one, so check out the full report.

MediaPost has a report on how Google, having conquered desktop search, increasingly appears to be “extending its dominion” to the mobile Internet:

“With a 62% share of mobile Web searches, Google’s market share on cell phones is roughly on par with its commanding lead in PC-based queries. Helping foster that connection, Google recently redesigned its mobile site to more closely resemble the desktop version.”

The report also said that Google is leading in SMS-text searches, with a 40% share compared to Yahoo’s 27%, according to Nielsen Mobile. That’s interesting, since text searches have a slight lead in popularity over mobile Internet searches in the U.S. at present—probably because many more people either are familiar with SMS text messaging, or have phones or plans that can only do that and not access the mobile Web (at least without incurring higher charges).

“While Yahoo got into mobile quickly and broadly and continues to lead as a brand in the mobile Internet, Google is positioning itself well as the leader in mobile search, through all forms including SMS, 411 and WAP (wireless application protocol),” said Nic Covey, director of insights for Nielsen Mobile, in the report.

Speaking of mobile Web browsing, Nielsen Mobile also just found that the U.S. takes the top spot for mobile Web surfing around the world. Coming in second was the U.K., where 12.9% of subscribers surf the net on their phones (in comparison to 15.6% for the U.S.). Italy brought up third place with an 11.9 percent penetration rate, according to MocoNews.

“In the 16 countries we looked at, the U.S. is tops in terms of penetration and I would say that surprises me at this point,” said the ever-knowledgeable Nic Covey, Nielsen’s director of insights, in the report.

The article also said that in May, 40 million wireless subscribers accessed the internet from a mobile device—an impressively large number, but still less than half of the 95 million who already pay to access the service. “We’ve seen this trend for a while now,” Covey added. “We don’t see that so much from other mobile media types.”