Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

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.

AdMob is hosting Lunch 2.0 on Halloween. Essential details:

• Hosts: AdMob US Headquarters
• Address: 60 East 3rd Avenue, Suite 225, San Mateo, CA 94401
• Date: Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 12:00pm-2:00pm
• RSVP on upcoming

There’ll be food, treats, and a presentation by Omar.

We released a bunch of data to share a view of our particular slice of the mobile web based on the requests we see coming through AdMob, and Dennis from WAPReview went ahead and added some additional data to some of our tables to take a view of the market by screensize. Fantastic, thanks for contributing Dennis!

There have been a bunch of questions about the data coming back in emails and in postings on discussion boards. Sometimes the quirks are things related to the fact that we’re measuring this across a publisher network which doesn’t map 1:1 against the normally carrier based (or survey based) metrics that commonly appear for us mobilists. And then there was the issue with us having called the United Kingdom “Great Britain” in the original report. Sorry, fixed that. Obviously, we don’t get out too much :-)

Some of the other numbers that have been called into question are a bit harder to pin down. Like the overall reported size of markets when compared to the numbers we see at AdMob. Are our numbers wrong or skewed by something we don’t have great visibility into? Or are the existing outside numbers skewed in some way? We released our numbers because the environment is very information poor at this point, it’s hard to find concrete sets of numbers pulled from hard data. We were hoping that feedback from outside would help us pin down places where maybe we’re doing things wrong. But also hoping that it would encourage others who have hard data to open up some of what they have so that the community can start to build a larger understanding of what exactly is happening on the mobile web.

It’s very much like the open source maxim that “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.” With enough interested folks watching the numbers and enough sources of information we should be able to get to a real shared understanding of just “how big the mobile web is” and how different areas compare. We’re planning to release numbers each month, tuning that report and refining the way we collect our data as we go. Being transparent with stuff like this means that sometimes you end up airing your mistakes for others to criticize. Thankfully the release has gone fantastic so far. I’m just hoping that when the time comes that we have something that we actually screwed up we don’t have to kill it off for fear of the negative PR.