13 Percent Of Australians Regularly Buy Content — Survey

The Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) has released the latest Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index report, which is available here. There’s some good figures in the report from the survey of 3735 Australian respondents to various promotions for the survey.
– 24 percent of respondents said they purchased content in the last 12 months, but only 13 percent said it was a typical expenditure on their phone bills. 28 percent said they accessed information services on their mobile phone in the last 12 months, with News (51%) and weather (46%) dominating the type of information services accessed. Overall 39 percent of respondents purchased content and/or accessed information services in the last 12 months.
– 60 percent of respondents said they purchased content via the internet on a PC, 22 percent via the carrier’s portal, 14 percent from the mobile phone menu. Only 4 percent entered a URL into the mobile internet, and only 4 percent used and SMS keyword — which was significantly less than last year.
– The top three types of content purchased were games (42%), true tones (38%) and polyphonic ringtones (37%). In Survey 2, polyphonic ringtones and wallpapers were the most popular types of content
purchased. In the previous survey mobile games were only the fourth most common piece of content purchased, and a figure of 42 percent is surprisingly high…I suspect selection bias. When asked what they want in the future, the most popular requests were for True Tones (31%), games (27%) and wallpapers (27%), while the most popular requests for future mobile information were for weather (40%), maps (38%) and news content (35%).

The survey asked about advertising on mobiles, and 89 percent of respondents would probably or definitely use more mobile content/information if it was free. When asked in what way they would accept advertisements, 30 percent said they would only accept ads for free or heavily subsidized content, 26 percent would only accept ads if they could easily opt out, and 21 percent said they would accept the ad if it didn’t impact upon the performance of the mobile phone. 66 percent of participants said that they wanted to choose between paying for the content and having advertising subsidise it.