UK Mobile Internet Usage Research 2011

We all know mobile Internet is growing. Many of you are a part of the growth, checking sports scores, browsing holidays, catching up on the news or even reading posts like this on your Smartphone. Whether you’re sitting in your lounge, standing around a supermarket or commuting, mobile devices are proving more popular than many thought possible for accessing the Internet.

With that in mind, at Six Search we carried out some UK mobile internet usage research of our own with a focus on the UK internet visitors. We took data from a number of websites in a number of different niche areas that gave us anything between 0.5 million and 1.5 million total website visits per month and we assessed how many were accessing these various sites from mobile devices.

We took our data from September 2009 right through to January 2011. We were pretty sure we would see an amazing growth over that period in terms of the percentage of a website’s users that are browsing from a mobile device and we were not wrong!

Key UK Mobile Internet Usage Research Findings

• In September 2009, just 0.02% of all UK web traffic originated from a mobile device. In January 2011 this figure was a staggering 8.09% (representing a growth of over 4000%)!

• iPhone traffic accounts for around 4.5% of all UK website traffic – not just mobile traffic!
• iPhone traffic accounts for more than half of mobile traffic.
• More people browsed UK websites in January 2011 from an iPad than from all Android powered devices put together.
• In fact, that’s been the case since September 2010, just over 3 months after the first iPad was launched in the UK.
• In January 2011, Apple devices accounted for more than 70% of all mobile traffic in the UK.
• If growth continues at the rate it did for the latter part of 2010, by June 2011, 13% of UK web traffic will be of mobile origin.