M:Metrics announced that over 12.3 million people from the U.S. and Western Europe accessed social networking services from their mobile devices in June 2007. Of that total, 7.5 million of those people were from the U.S., representing about 3.5% of mobile subscribers in America, more than the total number of people that downloaded mobile games in June, which was 6.9 million.
“With the mobile phone playing a central role in people’s social lives, it’s only natural that social networking sites are working to bridge the gap between the online and mobile worlds”, says Mark Donovan, senior analyst at M:Metrics.
MySpace was the most popular social networking site with 3.7 million U.S. and 440,000 UK mobile users, followed by 2 million Facebook users in the U.S. and 307,000 in the UK.
The bigger story could be the revenue MySpace might be making from this. Its partnered with AT&T, Helio, and Vodafone, and is charging $2.99 per month. If all 4,140,000 MySpace mobile users are paying $2.99 a month, then MySpace would be generating $12.4 million a month or $148.5 million a year, just from mobile subscriptions. Most likely many of these users are just accessing MySpace’s website off-deck, which is not as optimized as its mobile version. If we assume just 10% of these mobile users are paying for the MySpace service through its on-deck relationships with ATT/Cingular, Helio, and Vodafone, then 414,000 users would be generating approximately $1.24 million a month or $14.9 million a year. That figure seems reasonably when you consider that over 200,000 people signed up for the Cingular service within 2 months of rolling it out in Dec 2006 and 70% of Helio’s 100K subscribers use MySpace mobile. While that may be just a fraction of MySpace’s total online social networking users (160 million +) or online revenues ($550 million), it does represent the beginnings of a very attractive market for mobile social networking services.