By Markus Eichelhardt
Media agency Universal McCann recently published the results of a global study that showed that Brits are the leading nation when it comes to the use of SMS. According to this study, every single UK mobile phone user sends out an average of 100 texts per month. Well, congratulations!
Of course, I was certainly happy to further read that us Germans aren’t doing badly either. Here, the average user’s score is 65 – with an upward trend. However, the average American user only does 32.
Somewhere between the Brits and the Americans – could be worse, I thought. But, while I love statistics as much as any German, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that these findings were meant to tell me something beyond just the raw facts.
This strange feeling wouldn’t vanish until I remembered that I was once taught to esteem knowledge as a value in itself rather than to vulgarly interpret it in terms of national characteristics!
Refreshed by this insight, I decided to make a modest contribution to the happiness people might feel when they learn about the number of texts that whizz around the planet each year.
So, here’s the rest of the numbers:
The worldwide amount of messages has an upward trend. In Q1’07, it was 620 billion messages, which is an increase of 50% in comparison to Q1’06. Total revenue gained with mobile data increased 23% to $34.4 billion.
But perhaps the most interesting finding is that Brits make greater use of their mobile phones to send texts than to actually make phone calls. An average British user only makes 76 mobile phone calls per month. In contrast, the Russians and the Greek do 137. When it comes to the use of multimedia functions, Brits return to the top - 90% already used their mobile phone to take photos, 27% already downloaded video clips and 8% already took TV offerings – but at least 33% will do so in the future.
What does this say about our British cousins? I’ll leave that interpretation up to you...!
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