Arthur starts out by saying that counting cellular connections as customers causes an over-count in mobile usage numbers.

“More than half of urban South African cellphone users have had their phone for less than a year”.  This year 61% of cellphone users are aware if WAP and 62% aware of 3G.  68% know about data downloads and 69% about Internet downloads.  This indicates a high level of awareness, but by the same token 59% are aware of Mobile TV which no-one can actually use.

12% use 3G, 3o% use WAP, 38% use GPRS, 24% use data downloads.  If these stats can be generalised to Arthur’s estimation of 32 million mobile users, these numbers are all larger than 384,000 for 3G and double that for WAP. The sample size is 4oo urban users plus 2oo mobile banking users, but there was a rigid sample selection process.

Arthur’s blogging stats can be found on his Thought Leader post here.

“The blogosphere in its own right is becoming a viable media format in South Africa”.

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Rick Joubert from Vodacom argues that mobile media is the 7th mass medium already, and that it is not a sub-set of what we understand traditional online media to be. Looking at a matrix of reach, targeting, frequency and response and how mobile can deliver this to advertisers, mobile is the ultimate new medium.Mobile has twice the reach of TV and 3 x the reach of the Internet, globally. In 2oo6, global ad-spend on the internet was roughly the same as revenue from mobile content.Rick shows a quote from Stafford Masie, the Google country manager, saying that the South African Google story is mobile.Joubert thinks that the SA mobile space is currently serving about 1 billion monthly ad impressions and that this will rise to 5o billion by 2o11. Joubert stresses that these are his personal projections, not official figures.

WOW. Showing December OPA stats of top ten publishers compared to Vodafone Live are quite interesting, see below.

In the next year the major networks will start doing transcoding, or content adaptation, which will make the real Internet accessible using a much wider array of mobile phones.

As a few examples, Vodacom generate 1ook leads a month for Metropolitan Life, 84k downloads of Nike branded content, 52k downloads of Steers branded content. Geotagging via The Grid is going to be core to their social media efforts and a platform for social content creation.