Social Networking Going Mobile, Nielsen Finds

SAN FRANCISCO and LONDON, May 8 /PRNewswire/ -- A growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the streets, research conducted by The Nielsen Company reveals.

The findings, released by Nielsen Mobile, a service of The Nielsen Company, show that the U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking on a percentage basis -- with the U.S. boasting comparable numbers.

In the U.K., approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7 percent of all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008. That reach percentage was twice as high as it was in other major European markets-though similar to the U.S., where 1.6 percent of all mobile subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their phones in December 2007. For more details on mobile social networking access by country, see the chart below.

    Mobile Social Networking Reach - US and Europe

                   % of mobile subscribers who   Number of mobile subscribers
                   access social networks over    who access social networks
                   the mobile Internet            per month, over their phone

    United States           1.6%                             4,079,000
    United Kingdom          1.7%                               812,000
    Italy                   0.6%                               293,000
    Spain                   0.8%                               291,000
    France                  0.6%                               255,000
    Germany                 0.2%                               141,000

    Source: Nielsen Mobile; EU data Q1 2008, US data December 2007.

Leading PC Social Networking Sites are Also Tops Over Phones

In the U.S., MySpace.com, the leading social networking site among PC users is also the most popular mobile Internet social networking site. The site logged 2.8 million unique mobile users in December 2007. Also in December, Facebook, which has the second largest audience among social networking sites, had 1.8 million unique mobile users. In contrast, Facebook led mobile social networking sites in the U.K. with 557,000 unique mobile users per month in Q1 2008, while MySpace followed with 211,000 unique mobile users. While Facebook and MySpace.com were also among the top social networking sites in other European countries during the first quarter of 2008, MSN's Windows Live Spaces led in Italy (154,000 unique mobile users per month) and France (106,000), and ranked second in Germany (45,000) behind MySpace, which boasted 52,000 unique mobile users per month.

"Social networking is already a global phenomenon, and going mobile is the next big thing," said Jeff Herrmann, vice president of Mobile Media at Nielsen Mobile. "In the U.K. and the U.S. especially, we already see millions of users of MySpace.com, Facebook and other social networks interacting with their virtual spaces while they're on the go. Consumer demand for mobile social networking may be a significant driver of mobile service pricing models as evidenced by Vodafone UK's recent move to offer unlimited Internet access as a standard feature of its new monthly mobile price plans."

Nielsen's Mobile Internet Reports are available today in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. The reports provide detailed audience measurement metrics for mobile Internet and offer insights on how mobile users are interacting with social networking and other mobile Internet content.

About Nielsen Mobile

The Nielsen Mobile service of The Nielsen Company is the world's largest independent provider of syndicated consumer research to the telecom and mobile media markets. The Nielsen Mobile service focuses exclusively on tracking the behavior, attitudes and experiences of mobile consumers; their reports also provide up to seven years of data on Internet, video, gaming, audio and advertising trends for mobile phone users. Nielsen's technology-driven research provides unique and holistic insight into how mobile customers use their devices and what they think about brands, devices and services. For more information, please visit www.nielsenmobile.com.

About The Nielsen Company

The Nielsen Company is a global information and media company with leading market positions in marketing information (ACNielsen), media information (Nielsen Media Research), online intelligence (NetRatings and BuzzMetrics), mobile measurement, trade shows and business publications (Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek). The privately held company is active in more than 100 countries, with headquarters in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and New York, USA. For more information, please visit, www.nielsen.com.