About a third of this 1 percent have never used the phones to access the Internet. And of those who have, most do less than once a week. Other wireless providers report similarly low usage across Europe, with the exception of Scandinavia.
This brings up a good point that some of the WAP die-hards might've overlooked: the overwhelming majority of all wire-line internet traffic (and thus ad impressions) that's generated comes from browsing activities that just aren't suitable for cell phones given their small displays and manual I/O features. As we all know, it just doesn't make sense to do things like researching reports, reading 30 message board posts or ten News.com articles at a time, etc. via a phone, even if it was possible to do so.
Rather, the content that people seem to generally want is very basic, to-the-point stuff. Things like sports scores, stock quotes, etc. The only problem is, you can't generate a whole lot of traffic with content like that, and the highly limited amount of ad space available on a phone makes the situation even worse. For this reason, while companies offering wireless services based on transactions rather than viewing time (banking, stock trading, m-commerce) might do alright, the companies that are looking to be the CNets and ESPN.coms of the wireless world are probably going to be in for a rude awakening. Japan looks like it might prove to be an exception to this rule, but that's mostly due to the laughably low wire-line internet penetration rates there.
I could end up very wrong about this, but I think that the content-based WAP applications that might end up generating a lot of user time are those that involve two-way, person-to-person communications. After all, handsets were first created just for this purpose, and the popularity of SMS has been nothing short of astounding. Given these facts, things like instant messaging and chat rooms could allow WAP usage times to go through the roof if widely offered.
Then there's streaming audio/video, which for the reasons described in my last post, could act as the ultimate time-consumer, not to mention act as the killer app for high-bandwidth services. But a ton of issues have to be worked out here. On the other hand, a number of companies, including Infospace, have already come out with instant messaging and chat software for handsets.
Eric |
