Google says mobile usage has surged this summer
SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - Google Inc has seen a spike in usage of its mobile services since May, partly offsetting the traditional summer slump in computer-based Web surfing for the first time, an executive said on Wednesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Reuters reports from San Jose that Google's mobile services have seen a usage spike since May strong enough, by the company's account, to partly offset the traditional summer slump in computer-based web surfing for the first time. The claim lands amid a busy stretch for Google: it closed its YouTube acquisition last November and has confirmed plans to introduce ads there after years of keeping the site ad-free, and it just shipped Google Sky inside Google Earth while patching privacy complaints around Street View with automatic face and license-plate blurring.
The mobile number is also arriving alongside spectrum politics. Ars Technica picked the story up by pairing it with talk of Google invading telco turf, and CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly said the company will probably bid in the upcoming 700 MHz auction — an unconfirmed intention, but one that reframes a usage statistic as an entrant's market research.
First-order effects
- Google gains a year-round audience story for advertisers: handset usage now fills the seasonal trough that desktop web traffic leaves each summer, per the company's own executive.
- Incumbent wireless license holders get put on notice that a deep-pocketed internet company may contest the 700 MHz auction, though Schmidt's stated intention to bid remains unconfirmed.
Second-order effects
- Rival search engines and portals face pressure to field competitive mobile offerings immediately, since the summer months become a test bed where mobile-first users form habits rather than a dead season.
- If the 700 MHz bid materializes, network equipment vendors and handset makers gain a prospective customer outside the existing carrier structure, and mobile ad inventory — still unpriced at scale — becomes Google's obvious monetization path given its confirmed move to ads on YouTube.
Third-order effects
- Seasonality stops being a safe planning assumption for web businesses if usage migrates to carried devices rather than desk-bound PCs, flattening the traffic curves that media and advertising schedules were built around.
- Spectrum allocation becomes a structural lever over who controls mobile internet access: whether the 700 MHz licenses consolidate among incumbents or open the field to a new entrant shapes how many gatekeepers sit between users and the mobile web.
The trend: Internet access is shifting from the desktop to the handset, and Google is moving to capture both the traffic and, potentially, the wireless pipe it rides on.