(3 May 2008 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Nielsen, a US media research company, has reported that mobile internet has extended the audience reach of many net sites by an average of 13 per cent over home PC traffic alone in the US.

For some categories, such as weather and entertainment, the extended reach has been even greater at 22 per cent.

The cross-platform insights have come from TotalWeb, a new report from Nielsen.

TotalWeb has integrated data from Nielsen Mobile and Nielsen Online to show the audience for more than 200 leading Internet sites across the PC and mobile internet space.

Nielsen's data also show that for many internet publishers, mobile internet has increased the overall size of their audience.

For games and music sites, the rise has been 15 per cent.

Interestingly as per reports, social networking sites do not show much benefit as their rise has been three per cent only.

Also, sports sites have risen by 10 per cent.

Nielsen Mobile VP mobile media Jeff Herrmann said, "The data demonstrate that the mobile internet can not only increase the frequency of visits to a website, but also grow the overall size of the pie. Publishers can now monetise their total cross-platform audience, and advertisers will better understand the efficiency and incremental value of mobile Web traffic."

According to Nielsen, 87 million US mobile users subscribe to mobile internet services, and more than one in ten mobile subscribers (13.7 per cent) actively uses mobile internet each month.

AccuWeather.com received a 43 per cent audience lift from mobile net users.

The company's executive director Dave Wrieden said, "Unduplicated measurement of the total internet audience will help AccuWeather.com show advertisers the value of our cross-platform audience. Nielsen's TotalWeb service is the only product that gives us that number and so is an important advancement in internet audience measurement."