The popularity of WAP-enabled mobile phones continued to surge in July, with the total number of page impressions viewed in the UK hitting 904 million, according to the latest research from the Mobile Data Association (MDA).
The figures from GSM Network operators O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone represent a 15% increase on the previous month and take the daily average for July to 29 million, up from 26 million in the same period last year.
The increase in WAP usage is being driven by high consumer interest in mobile games, downloads and ringtones. The MDA recently predicted that sales of ringtones would reach £70 million in 2003, an increase of 60% on 2002 sales, which amounted to £44 million (see Mobile Ringtones Find The Right Rhythm).
Ringtone sales are increasingly being seen as a lifeline to the beleaguered music industry, which has come under siege from the increased piracy facilitated by napster-style sites offering free downloads of the latest albums.
Mike Short, chairman of the MDA, said: “We know that six to eight million mobile phone users have downloaded a ringtone, but some people have done it many times. That still leaves around 42 million users who haven’t downloaded a ringtone yet, which offers huge potential”.
The MDA expects WAP page impressions to reach 8 billion by the end of this year and July’s figure takes the cumulative total for 2003 so far to over 4.5 billion.
The latest SMS data shows that more than 1.68 billion person to person text messages were sent across the four UK GSM networks in July 2003, up from 1.3 billion in the same period the previous year (see Reality Boost For Text Messaging In July).
