IAB blog

Stuart Aitken

In Saturday’s Guardian, Alan Rusbridger listed the 10 ways in which his life has changed since the last century. It was no great surprise that Google took the top spot. Neither was it a massive surprise that Wikipedia came second – although there is evidence to suggest that this online super power is on the wane. Twitter coming in third place raised a few more eyebrows while Rusbridger was forced to admit that putting Comment Is Free in fourth position was “a plug for the home team”. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the list though was the iPhone coming in a paltry 6th position.

“Can you remember the moment when you first held one?” asked Rusbridger. “The involuntary gasp as you saw what it could do?” While he acknowledges that as a result of the iPhone, “the only limit to what a mobile phone could become is human imagination itself”, it’s something of a surprise that the editor of The Guardian shouldn’t rate the technology higher, given its potential for growing his brand’s digital audience.

As well as offering a serious boost to Apple’s bottom line, the iPhone has revolutionised the way we consume media. IAB research shows that 40 per cent of iPhone users already use the internet on their phones more than on a PC, helping to fuel a spectacular surge in mobile internet usage. What’s more, over one billion iPhone apps have been downloaded worldwide with the average UK user downloading 37 each. According to Comscore, 11.3 million people in the UK use the mobile internet per month, representing a rise of 28 per cent year on year, while some 597,112 people in the UK use applications per month, a 1,724 per cent rise year on year.

This has helped to feed improvements across the board in the mobile market with rapid improvements to handsets and high speed networks, affordable data plans and mass consumer browsing now the norm. As Tim Hussain, head of mobile and video advertising at BSkyB, said at the IAB mobile forum last month, "the world did change with the iPhone".

On Monday, Rusbridger’s paper wrote: “Have you noticed how it’s impossible to read a newspaper these days without coming across a story about an iPhone? It’s as if the very word confers instant coolness and connectedness”. The Guardian concluded that the word “iPhone” had occurred “a whopping” 143 times in national newspapers over the last week. Two things are interesting about this. Firstly, 143 mentions of the word “iPhone” doesn’t actually sound like a lot, and secondly, “coolness” is not the most important reason for talking about the iPhone.

We at the IAB believe that the iPhone – and other smart phones like it – go beyond cool and instead open up hugely useful services for people looking to consume media on the move.  It’s as a result of these changes that we’ve decided to revamp our mobile offering in partnership with Incentivated. Our new mobile site is now up and running – why not check it out.

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