The Mobile Data Association (MDA), London, UK, published figures in January showing that the UK has an ever growing appetite for mobile messaging.
The continued growth of messaging is highlighted by a 2009 daily average of 265 million text messages and 1.6 million picture messages. 2009’s text message total was 96.8 billion, while over 600 million picture messages were sent across the whole year.
Text messaging traffic over the last festive period continued to rise with an increase of 31% in text messaging on Christmas Day (441,805,870 texts), and an increase of 21% on New Years Eve/Day (874,033,799 texts), from 2008 figures.
Assessing the findings of the MDA’s report, Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst at Quocirca, said: “New generation touchscreen handsets and the bundling of SMS messages into many tariffs has made texting easier, and seen its role develop. Now it is not only a convenient medium for a quick chat with friends, but also a way of participating in television voting and raising funds for needy charities. When a powerful call to action is given, the population of the UK often turn first towards their mobile phones.”
Steve Reynolds, MDA Chairman, said: “These statistics show that even with new social media forms of messaging such as Twitter and Facebook, people are using SMS as a social messaging tool because of its simplicity and ubiquity. There remains a significant and still developing role for text messaging. In a seemingly relentless tide of status updates, tweets and pokes, the UK population’s love affair with mobile messaging for instant, on-the-go communication continues to deepen ”
Reynolds concluded, “The majority of mobile phone users know how to quickly send a text message, wherever they happen to be. It will still be some time before the same can be said for other social messaging forms.”
Q4 2009 Statistical findings
Text Messaging (SMS)
Total number of text messages (SMS) sent in:
2009 total 96.8 billion
2008 total 78.9 billion
2007 total 56.9 billion
Downloaded from www.text.it
