Email access trending away from web, toward mobile

According to the results of a new comScore study, email users overwhelmingly favor accessing their account through mobile devices rather than desktop or laptop computers.

In the three-month period ending in November, 70.1 million mobile users - or 30 percent of all mobile subscribers - accessed email on their device. That is a 36 percent increase over 51.6 million users that accessed mobile email during the same period in 2009.

Daily mobile email usage increased even more last year, as 43.5 million users access email on their device each day, an increase of 40 percent. In the three months ending in November 2009, 31.1 million users checked mobile email on a daily basis.

Figures for the change in unique visitors, total minutes and total pages reduced drastically for web-based email for a number of age groups between November 2009 and November 2010, comScore revealed. The drop was especially evident among the 12-to-17 age range.

For that age group, the change in unique page views for web-based email plummeted 24 percent. The changes were even more dramatic for the number of minutes spent on web-based email and the number of pages. Those categories dropped 48 and 53 percent, respectively.

The categories for ages 55 to 64 and over 65 are the only ones where all three criteria increased for web-based email. The 55-to-64 group experienced a 16 percent increase for the number of unique page views, 15 percent for minutes and 9 percent for the total numbers of pages. The figures were increases of 8, 17 and 13 percent, respectively for users age 65 and older.

In terms of genders, males are less likely to access email through the web than females. According to the report, males decreased their unique page views 12 percent, minutes 12 percent and the total number of pages 19 percent. Females increased their unique views by 1 percent, but decreased their minutes 7 percent and total pages 11 percent.

The proliferation of smartphones and tablets appears to be affecting the data consumption of their users. The popularity of mobile applications skyrocketed in 2010, leading market research firm IDC to predict that mobile apps will handle any number of daily tasks and change the computing tendencies of consumers in the coming years.