Research News South Africa

Accessing sport on cellphones grows

Sport24, the sports website, ran an online survey in October 2009 - touching on the basics (age, sex and ethnicity), the realities (quotas in sport) and the fun stuff (why sports fans prefer John Smit to Lee-Anne Liebenberg) in South African sport with over 7000 readers taking part. Other topics touched on the ways and means of accessing online news, with Sport24 users clearly being big fans of the ‘mobile internet' now.
Accessing sport on cellphones grows

Results

Sport24 publisher Andrew ‘Tank' Lanning finds his readers' online trends very interesting…

“The trend toward accessing sport content on your cellphone talks to the fact that we live in a ‘Now' generation - people want information at their fingertips, which a mobile phone does for you and it's also why we've done so much work on our WAP site and iPhone application.”

Connections


  • ADSL remains the most popular way of readers accessing the internet at home, with 30.12% operating that way, but 3G and HSDPA are fast closing the gap with 28.15% of the survey participants making use of the ‘mobile internet'. Interestingly, 15.39% of internet users rely on their mobile phones - even when at home.
  • In all, 62.30% of the survey's participants say they access the internet via their cellphones - for news on the go - whilst just fewer than 20% of the readers admitted to not making use of the internet facilities on their phones. (Almost 75% of those cellphone users have contracts, with 25.02% making use of prepaid services.)
  • Nokia phones were by far the most popular handsets (with more than half the participants in the survey making use of them), with ‘smart phones' - iPhone, Blackberry and HTC making up just over 10% of Sport24 users.

Commenting on the rise of 3G as people's chosen means of connection, he continued, “The fact that people are using 3G as their point of access at home, or just their actual cellphones is about the high prices and perhaps general ineptness of our fixed line providers in South Africa. It's an international anomaly and an indictment on our country.”

Social networks

As far as social networking trends are concerned, Facebook remains the most popular way of following news, but nearly 38% of the survey participants had no idea what social networking is, with 5% not knowing what blogs are either.

Visit www.Sport24.co.za this week to find out more about the survey.

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