Mobile Web growth in the South African Media sector

We calculated the growth in the mobile web for the media sector using public statistics from Nielsen (as reported on MyBroadband [1,2,3,4])  [#1].

We settled on using "South African unique browsers / vistors" rather than page impressions. (The ratio of page impressions to unique browsers ranges from 3-10, with a fat tail, so you can imagine the margin of error). As you can expect there are all sorts of assumptions we needed to make - the most important being managing the observation that Mobi sites are rebranded and moved around between DNS's.

Thus we made some assumptions and smoothed the data (considerably).

The conclusion? Year on year growth of the mobile web in the media sector is 166%.

We projected this into 2013 [#2].

Here is the "raw" data.

This is obtained from the Nielsen Top 10 over 4 periods - please note that some web-sites enter then exit then re-enter the statistics, other web-sites were renamed over the period of the survey.

The conclusion - the mobile web is growing exponentially. The monetisation models of the mobile web are still quite primitive though. Also, it seems from related evidence that the big players are doing anything and everything in a land grab.

Notes

[1] It should be noted that the DMMA/Effective Measure statistics only ranks South African websites registered with the DMMA, which means that large portals like BidorBuy, Gumtree and the banks are not listed.

[2] Please note, these projections have many systematic and other errors. Please consult with the author before you use them.

References

[1] Jan 2012 http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/43357-biggest-and-best-sa-website...

[2] Jan 2011 http://mybroadband.co.za/news/cellular/18919-south-africa-s-top-websites...

[3] Jul 2010 http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/14619-top-mobi-sites-in-sa-sport-...

[4] April 2010 http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/12308-biggest-mobile-websites-in-...