After we released the first version of AdMob Mobile Metrics some people took a look at the numbers and said “You served more than 650 million pages in the US in a month? There are only 240 million subscribers, that number seems really high.” Oh does it? How about those 240 million subscribers generating an average of more than 4 messages per user per day? Did you expect that? Think of all the people you know that have mobile phones and don’t use SMS. For me it’s my mother, my father, two of my sisters, my aunt. Think about who you get daily SMS from, for me it’s only 3 people. With about a dozen that I get a message from once every week or two. Everyone else out out there that does makes up the slack to make the average more than 4 per day per person. Now think that the average across all users for the mobile web is 3 pages per user PER MONTH! Still sound weird?
Take a look at Russ’s take on the numbers too. US subscriber count larger than what the census predicts for users of phone-carrying age? Where do all the extra users come from? Whenever people see numbers that don’t match up their first reaction is normally “Oh, the numbers are wrong”. The other possibility is that something is going on that isn’t expected or understood. Getting to the bottom of it is usually a pretty nasty process, but well worth it in the long run.
