Almost 900 million page impressions were made on WAP phones during September as mobile internet services continued to increase in popularity, according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association.
The latest figure represents a rise of 14 million on the previous month and takes the daily average number of WAP impressions to 30 million, compared to 11 million per day in the same period the previous year.
The MDA claims that the huge increase in mobile internet activity has been stimulated by the growing popularity of ringtone downloads. September’s figure provides a cumulative total for 2003 of over 6 billion, which puts WAP page impressions on course to reach a target of 8 billion by the end of the year
Mobile access to the internet presents huge potential to advertisers and usage has trebled in the last 12 months. Mike Short, chairman of the MDA, said: “We have seen significant growth of WAP in the last 12 months and an ever-increasing number of compelling services on offer” (see NewsLine).
The latest SMS figures from the MDA show that the number of person to person text messages sent across the UK’s four GSM networks during September beat all previous records to reach 1.73 billion (see Text Messages Reach Record Levels In September).
