AirG Claims 20 Million Users of Mobile Social Networking Services

Published on: 17th October 2007

The mobile based social networking site, AirG says that it surpassed more than 20 million customers on August 26, 2007. In addition, AirG is also now available in more than 10 languages and claims to has the largest global footprint across more than 100 mobile operators in over 40 countries.

"Achieving this important milestone is proof that our mobile community possesses the scale and customer engagement necessary to make AirG an important partner for mobile operators and advertisers," said Frederick Ghahramani, founder of AirG. "I'd like to congratulate our channel partners and talented team members for building and supporting the products and services that have engaged more than 20 million consumers on their mobile phones."

According to a new study from Juniper Research, the number of users of mobile chat and dating services is expected to rise from just over 40 million in 2007 to 260 million in 2012, driven by strong demand in both developed and emerging markets, with revenues expected to exceed $1 billion by 2010. Based on these analyst forecasts, AirG's current customer base is equivalent to half of the entire globally projected market size for mobile chat and dating services.

Much like their online counterparts, mobile communities drive tremendous user adoption, data traffic and content consumption. AirG generates a phenomenal volume of mobile traffic and billions of advertising impressions per month across its footprint of downloadable services, mobile internet and SMS services. Using a combination of detailed user profile information and insightful surveys, AirG can identify valuable consumer demographics like the age, location, interests, gender and phone type of all 20 million customers. For example, AirG knows that on August 26, 2007 at 1:14:28 AM GMT Ana from Fort Smith, Arizona became AirG's 20 millionth customer using her Samsung SCH-A870 mobile phone. AirG also knows that the majority of its customers spend more than an hour a day in the community, 59 percent don't own a PC, 60 percent have obtained at most a high school education, the average annual income is US$41,000, and the five most popular handsets used to access AirG all retail for less than US$100 with a service contract.

"The market is in a frenzy over new devices like the iPhone, but the reality today is that the mass market consumer is using $0-$100 handsets to access mobile services," added Ghahramani. "Seeing past the hype associated with niche audiences like the digerati and technophile early adopters has been a crucial part of what has enabled AirG to achieve its scale of 20 million customers."

It was not clarified if the 20 million userbase were "active users" by the time of publication.

 

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