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If you were to imagine the type of person you believed was driving the adoption of the mobile web, that person would probably be a young, white yuppie yapping away on his iPhone. The only problem with that image is that new statistics say poorer African-Americans and Hispanics are actually driving the adoption of the mobile web in a much more significant way.
According to the Pew Research Center’s recent report on how age and ethnicity are driving the mobile web, “African-Americans and English-speaking Latinos continue to be among the most active users of the mobile web. Cell phone ownership is higher among African-Americans and Latinos than among whites (87% vs. 80%) and minority cell phone owners take advantage of a much greater range of their phones’ features compared with white mobile phone users.”
Indeed, when it comes to surfing the web, the report reckons 18% of African-Americans use their mobile phones as their only form of Internet access, compared with just 10% of whites.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report also found that those lower down the socio-economic ladder were less likely to own a laptop than a cell phone and therefore were more likely to go online from their handsets, which makes a fair bit of sense.
To quantify that number further, Pew says young under 30’s living in households making less than $30,000 a year are the ones driving the mobile Web with African-American and Hispanic populations younger and poorer on average than their white counterparts.
A report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posits that even around 73% of adults under the poverty line have cell phones. This is largely made possible by prepaid or pay-as-you-go options, which often provides an affordable solution for those even on the tightest of budgets and who can’t afford a contract.
Interestingly, according to comScore, despite being poorer on average than whites, Hispanics index above average on smartphone usage representing 10.3% of the smartphone audience compared to 7.1% of the total mobile audience.
Even more puzzlingly, Latinos seem to have a strong affinity for Apple’s iPhone, with around 10% of their total mobile population owning one, compared to just 5.3% of African American phone owners.
