It’s becoming increasingly clear that one day in what could be the near future, the mobile web will overtake the wired web in usage. In fact, this morning research firm comScore released numbers showing web usage numbers from January for both the mobile and wired web confirming this.
While the United States contributed 192 million unique wired web visits in January, roughly 70 million Americans accessed the mobile web at least once in the same month. 63.2 million used the mobile web for news and information; 22.3 million or roughly 32 percent used the mobile web at least once a day for the same function.
Mobile social network access contributed 9.2 million unique US visitors in January, over a 4-fold increase since January 2008, confirming that while mobile social networking isn’t a mainstream phenomenon yet, people are becoming more comfortable with it.
Mapping applications were the most popular downloads with 8.2 million users.
As you can see from the charts, different aspects of the mobile web doubled in popularity at a minimum across the board. It’s clear that despite privacy concerns and other worries slowing the growth of mobile location-based services and social networking, growth has still been fairly explosive and by January 2010 I won’t be surprised if mobile web usage has equaled wired web usage in the United States.
