Phones account for the majority of non-computer traffic. Mobile devices drive 4.4% of total digital traffic, tablets contribute 1.9%, and other non-computer devices send 0.5% of traffic.

The comScore data come from a recent report entitled Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits. The white paper is available for free (with registration) from comScore's website.

We reported earlier this year that worldwide mobile data traffic is expected to increase 26-fold to 75 exabytes per year (!) by 2015. That's 19 billion DVDs, just to give you a sense. To put it another way, that's 75 times the size of the entire Internet in the year 2000. The mobile revolution is underway, and it behooves those who make Web content to get onboard.

How do you split up your Web use between desktop/laptop, mobile and tablets? Tell us in the comments.

Well, guess what? It worked! Look what our headline reads!

Still, it is an impressive number, and one that puts competing app stores to shame. And Apple had even more new numbers to reveal today, too.

Some of these numbers represent an increase over those revealed at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. At that time, Apple had reached 400,000 mobile apps, 90,000 of which were iPad-specific and 14 billion downloads.

Compared to Others

To put these numbers in context, Google said at its I/O conference in May that the Android Market had reached 4.5 billion downloads, and Google has seen over 100 million devices activated worldwide. Also at that time, Google was activating 400,000 Android devices daily. By the end of June, Google's Android chief Andy Rubin reported that daily activations had increased to 500,000 per day.

Google said, too, that there are over 200,000 apps in the Android Market. What it didn't want to tell you, however, is how many work on Android tablets. It's an embarrassing number that may be somewhere from 50 to 100, reports The New York Times.

As for Nokia, it's seeing over 6 million apps and content downloads per day, and more than 300,000 new Nokia accounts created daily. The Ovi store is now home to over 48,000 apps. Nokia also said that Qt developers can target more than 100 million devices now, and will be able to target 150 million more in the future, due to the Symbian smartphones Nokia intends to sell.

RIM is now seeing 3 million app downloads per day, the company announced in March, up from 1 million just under a year ago. Microsoft's newcomer Window Phone reached its own milestone recently: 25,000 apps, up from 11,500 in March.

To reach its conclusions, SocialNuggets monitored over 12,000 social media mentions, blog posts, forum postings and other online mentions. The results are not surprising. For the most part, the reaction to nearly all of Apple's announcements, from iOS 5 to iCloud and beyond, was overwhelmingly positive.

Below are a few major takeaways from the SocialNuggets data.

• iOS 5, iCloud and Mac OS X Lion had a strong Share of Voice and positive perception, and were the three most talked about topics.
• Twitter integration was the least discussed topic.
• iMessage scored well in terms of Share of Voice and perception, but Trailed iOS 5, iCloud and Lion on both fronts.

Comparing WWDC Day 1 and 2

• The top three discussion topics were the same on both days, but iOS 5 was talked about more than Lion on Day 2. This indicates a shift in Apple's Developer community, says SocialNuggets, where iOS is a more popular topic (and perhaps platform) than Mac.
• Lion, however, still stayed in the top 3 both days, indicating the Mac's developer community remains strong.
• iCloud gained on Day 2, as people learned about it in more detail and began to understand how it worked. Lion lost steam on Day 2.
• iMessage was the 4th most popular topic, after iOS 5, iCloud and Lion.  MobileMe's death was 5th.
• It was surprising how few conversations were about the Twitter integration.

It's also a major increase from Cisco's report last year, which forecasted an increase to 40 exabytes by 2014.

Compared with Last Year

In last year's annual snapshot of mobile data traffic, Cisco had predicted traffic would jump from 0.09 exabytes per month in 2009 to 0.2 exabytes per month in 2010, and by 2014, it would reach 3.6 exabytes per month.

Those figures (at least for 2010), were right on the mark - even a little lower than what the actual data collected ended up showing. According to this latest report, the monthly data traffic in 2010 was 237 petabytes per month, while Cisco had predicted 204.8 petabytes previously (0.2 exabytes = 204.8 petabytes).

By 2015: 6.3 Exabytes per Month

Now Cisco is extending its earlier forecast to 2015, the year when mobile data traffic will reach 6.3 exabytes per month,  a compound annual growth rate of 92%.

By 2015, there will be more than 5.6 billion personal devices, like smartphones and tablets, connected to mobile networks as well as 1.5 billion machine-to-machine nodes - a stat that's equivalent to nearly one mobile connection for every person on earth, says Cisco.

Today's average mobile connection generates 65 megabytes of traffic per month, which is about 15 MP3 music files. By 2015, that will increase 17 times to 1,118 megabytes per month, or 260 MP3's.

Growth Trends: Mobile Video, Tablets

The continuing mobile data surge comes from, in large part, mobile video traffic. This traffic is expected to represent 66% of all mobile data traffic by 2015.

Also expected to grow dramatically is tablet device use, which will increase 205-fold from 2010 to 2015, the highest growth rate for any device category. Combined with smartphones, laptops and other portable tablet devices, this group of personal devices will account for 87% of the global mobile traffic by 2015.

Tablets in particular will generate 248 petabytes per month by 2015 - that's more than the entire global mobile network did in 2010 (237 petabytes per month)! The same will also be true for machine-to-machine connections - 295 petabytes in 2015.

Contributing to the increased consumption, too, is the increasing global mobile network connection speeds. The average connection speed doubled from 2009 to 2010 and will increase 10-fold by 2015.

By Region

Mobile data traffic is now outpacing fixed broadband traffic, says Cisco. Last year, it grew 4.2 times as fast. The regions with the highest growth rates are the Middle East and Africa, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 129%.

Latin America will have a 111% CAGR, Central and Eastern Europe will have a 102% CAGR, Asia-Pacific a 101% CAGR, Western Europe a 91% CAGR, North America an 83% CAGR and Japan a 70% CAGR.

For a more detailed look into these findings, you can download the full report from Cisco.com here.

This suggests that users are "seeking more frequent quick hits," says Experian, "rather than spending longer periods of time reading through posts."

The new report also shows that the average number of visits is up year-over-year (data measured from November 2009 to November 2010). The average number of visits rose 37%, says Experian, from 7.3 visits per month in November 2009 to 10 visits per month as of November 2010.

However, the raw numbers show a decline. In November 2009, 9.54 million U.S. adults visited Twitter.com during the past 30 days, while in November 2010, only 8.25 million did.

This is the chart Experian posted, however. What's with the dates "2013" and "2014?" That's probably a mistake. We're pretty sure they were looking at data from 2009 and 2010. Hey, typos happen. Let's not go by the chart.

In any event, declining visits to Twitter.com isn't any reason for concern. Although Experian doesn't make note of this, this is clearly more indicative of the growing number of mobile Twitter users who now primarily access Twitter via their phones (over 40% of tweets are posted from mobiles), as opposed to visiting the website Twitter.com from a computer. It also doesn't track the numerous Twitter client applications currently in use, including official offerings from Twitter for devices like the iPhone, iPad, or Android and BlackBerry smartphones as well as the new desktop app Twitter for Mac.

If anything, this data is only a slice of the overall pie. All it really shows is that Twitter remains popular, that popularity is growing, but accessing the site through a desktop browser is trending down.

It was a bit of an eye-opener, as is the latest data from Pew Research finds that only 8% of online American adults use Twitter.

According to the survey overview, Pew took a different approach this time around with its questions. Previously, it had asked "Do you ever use the internet to use Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?" and many publications questioned its methodology. This time around, it simply asked "Do you use Twitter?" and it arrived at this 8% figure.

The survey breaks down Twitter usage according to a number of demographics, finding that Twitter users are primarily between the ages of 18 to 29 and are twice as likely to be black or Hispanic and live in a city. Women and college-educated Internet users are also more likely users of the micro-messaging service.

In addition to looking at who uses Twitter, Pew examined how they used Twitter and found that 65% of Twitter users check the site for updates at most once or twice a week. Nearly a quarter of all users check several times a day, while just over 10% check the site once daily.

Does this change how you see Twitter? Are you so thoroughly enveloped in techiedom that you naturally assume people are on Twitter and using it daily? How about the opposite - does 8% seem like a high number to you? And most importantly, how about you - do you use Twitter?

Prior to this quarter (Q3 2010), RIM held the number four spot. It's now at number five. Apple's move up the charts also ousted Sony Ericsson, which has now exited the top five altogether.

In total, Apple shipped 14.1 million units over the past three months.

For comparison purposes, the top three vendors, Nokia, Samsung and LG Electronics shipped 110.4 million, 71.4 million and 28.4 million units, respectively. Number five RIM shipped 12.4 million.

Combined, all mobile phone vendors shipped 340.5 million units this quarter, up from 297.1 million units in the third quarter of 2009.

What's perhaps even more remarkable than the rankings alone are the numbers associated with growth. Apple has grown 90.5% year-over-year. The leader Nokia, has grown just 1.8%, however. And LG has dropped to -10.1%. RIM is more than just hanging in there, though, with 45.9% growth, and Samsung, a popular choice for Android smartphones, has grown 18.6%. It will be interesting to revisit these numbers again at year-end - especially if Samsung ships its supposed "Nexus Two/Nexus S" Gingerbread phone before the close of 2010.

While Chitika's data puts Bing at a paltry 0.58%, the actual number is probably quite a bit higher. As Chitika's research director Daniel Ruby told us, this data only represents Web traffic from Safari. The native Bing app for the iPhone does not send a referral URL, so it is almost impossible to fully understand its impact on Bing's iPhone traffic. He estimates that the "real" number for Bing is somewhere between 1% and 4% (though we would guess that it's at the lower end of this scale).

Sadly, the Pew study did not ask users about their sentiments towards video calling. There is some anecdotal evidence that many people prefer voice calls and don't feel comfortable being on video. Qualcomm's senior vice president for Global Marketing Bill Davidson, for example, told us last week that he does not believe that video calling will be a killer feature for the next generation of wireless data networks as users simply aren't that interested in it. It would have been nice to see some data to either back this up or bust this as a myth.

Instead, the Pew survey focuses on the demographics of those who use video calls. There are no major surprises there. More affluent and younger users tend to use video calling more than others, for example, and urban users are far more likely to participate in video calls than users in rural regions (27% vs. 12%).

Why is this happening? Why are apps becoming more popular than music?

The original chart was posted on Asymco's website, home to a hybrid industry analysis advisory and app development firm. Assuming the data the firm has collected is accurate (they say it comes from statements made by Apple representatives), Apple customers will have downloaded more iPhone/iPod/iPad apps than songs sometime in the near future, either by year end or just a few weeks later.

That's a staggering thought, when you really think about it. After all, the original iPhone didn't even support the development of third-party mobile applications when it launched in summer 2007. It wasn't until March of the following year that Apple released development tools (the iPhone SDK, or software development kit), allowing aspiring developers to begin work on mobile creations that would run on an upcoming version of the iPhone operating system, due out later that summer.

When launched, however, these natively-built iPhone applications quickly became more popular the previously supported "Web applications" in terms of usage. App downloads surged and have been surging ever since.

But why are these apps, popular as they may be, on the path to besting music in terms of sheer download numbers?

Ouriel Ohayon, the creator of mobile application sharing and discovery platform AppsFire, has ventured a few guesses and we think he's right on the money. Here are the reasons he puts forth on the AppsFire blog:

1. Apps Let You Personalize Your Phone

Apps let you personalize your phone in the same way as only ringtones and wallpapers once did. They are the new music playlists, in a sense, he says. In many ways I think that's true - I know the first thing I do when I get hold of someone else's mobile phone is look at what apps they're using. I could care less what their musical interests are. However, I don't think this is the main reason for the trend.

2.Many Apps are Free

Ohayon says that apps are surpassing music in part because so many of them are free. That's hard to argue with. Apps are probably sampled more often because they're free. However, some of those free apps probably aren't used as often as the 99-cent song you knew you liked enough to purchase is listened to. Nor do free apps make up the majority of iPhone apps available for sale - roughly 70% are paid. Free apps cater to our desire to buy things on impulse, but without the guilt of throwing our money away. So what if you only play that game once? It was worth the price - nothing - to kill five minutes of time while in the waiting room of the doctor's office.

3. Apps Provide Downloaded Music Substitutes

Mobile applications like Pandora, Last.fm, Deezer, Spotify, MOG and Rdio provide free and/or paid subscriptions to streaming music. You don't need to download and pay for a song in iTunes if you use one of these applications - you can just listen to it over the Internet instead. Apple itself may have caught onto this trend, too. The company recently purchased streaming service Lala.com, which many suspect will be turned into a subscription-based, Internet music streaming service for iTunes.

In addition, some apps are music themselves. Ohayon points to apps like this Lady Gaga one or this Katy Perry one, for example, that package popular music within mobile applications. Some games also feature music like Katy Perry Revenge or Lyric Legend, which, when you think about it, is actually a new format for listening to music. But there are many, many others beyond the few mentioned here.

In fact, we spotted this trend nearly a year ago, noting the rise of "music-themed" apps that offer tunes and other content from artists. We then cited examples from NIN, Moby and Usher as artists who were using apps to promote their songs. (See: "Forget the iTunes LP, Apps are the New Album"). Still, the most devoted fans will probably buy both the app and the album, since only the latter usually works in playlists and when you go offline.

While no single reason can explain this trend in its entirety, the reasons put forth by Ohayon are reasoned and sound, we think. Asymco's Horace Dediu agrees, responding to Ohayon via the comments of the post, saying "apps are indeed content," referring to how apps can replace other forms of content. "Apps-as-media has implications in the way they are produced, marketed, priced and consumed," writes Dediu. "All the data since has been nothing but confirmation of this."

The iPad sold 2 million units in its first 2 months on the market, or 3 iPads a second, as Jobs happily pointed out today at Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. During that same period, apps for the device have been released at a rate of roughly 140 per day. According to our calculations, it took the iPhone and iPod Touch more than twice that time to accrue 8,500 apps, growing at a slower rate of 56 per day.

The faster growth of iPad apps is likely due to the fact that the AppStore is not new, and many developers - having long since recognized the potential of the app market - have been building apps for many months already. It is not likely, however, that iPad app creation numbers will pass those of the iPhone and iPod Touch any time soon. The pair of devices has added 31,500 apps since the iPad launch - a growth rate of 525 per day.

iPhone Apps Still Sell Far Better Than iPad

The fascinating other half of this statistic is that while iPad apps are growing much faster than iPhone/iPod apps did initially, iPhone and iPod apps sold much better during their first few months, and continue to today. In the first 90 days of the AppStore's existence, 100 billion downloads made their way to the handheld devices. If the iPad is going to break that number, it will need to sell 65 million apps this month, nearly double its 2-month sales figure of 35 million apps sold.

App sales and the number of available apps have been increasing exponentially since the launch of the AppStore, and the iPad launch helped the last two months become the fasted period of growth for apps yet. In just two months, 1 billion apps were sold, up to 5 billion from 4 billion back in early April. The total number of apps also increased by 40,000 apps, from 185,000 to 225,000.

Is Price to Blame?

The iPad accounted for 21% of app growth, but just 3% of app sales - a figure that compliments why iPhone and iPod touch users install twice as many apps than iPad users. According to a study by Nielson, users of the handsets average around 37 apps on their device, while today Steve Jobs mentioned iPad users average just 17 per device. A mobile research firm out the Netherlands found that iPad apps run an average price of $4.67, whereas iPhone and iPod touch apps are $.80 less at $3.87 - an obvious deterrent to iPad app sales.

Apple also says it receives 15,000 app submissions a week, and that 95% of apps are accepted through within a week of being submitted. Based on these figures, 114,000 apps or updates to existing apps were pushed into the AppStore in the last two months. Since only 40,000 new apps were added during that time, this means that roughly two-thirds of app submissions are updates to existing applications.

A Lucrative Market

It's no wonder the updates keep rolling in, because developers are making good chunks of change on the AppStore. Steve Jobs says Apple has paid developers over $1 billion in AppStore revenue shares, or over $4,400 per app on average. If Apple has paid out over $1 billion to developers, that means it has pocketed over $428 million from its 30% cut of app sales.

At its current growth rate, the AppStore should pass the 10 billion downloads mark in early April 2011. However, with the continued exponential growth seen in the infographic above, it wouldn't be surprising to see the AppStore break this number as soon as the end of the year.

Shopping sites like Walmart.com, Target and BestBuy both saw a substantial monthly decline of around 35% compared to December. Amazon, however, only lost 5%, which suggests that the world's most popular online shopping destination relies less on seasonal traffic than most of its competitors.

Tax and Travel Up

With the tax season in the U.S. in full swing, it doesn't come as a surprise that services like HRBlock.com, Intuit.com and Taxactonline.com saw solid growth since December. In total, Compete notes that sites in its "Financial Services: Accountancy and Tax Service" category were up 292% compared to December 2009. Maybe even more importantly, these numbers are also up 11.5% compared to January 2009, which is a strong indicator that more and more people now prepare and file their taxes online. Last week, we talked to representatives from Intuit's Turbotax division, who also noted that the company's online services now post some of Intuit's largest growth rates.

As travelers start to plan their 2010 vacations, sites like HotWire.com (up 32% month-over-month) and TripAdvisor.com (up 24%) also posted solid gains.

Other Notable Numbers: New York Times, CNet, Twitter and Bing

Among news sites in Competes top 50, the New York Times (#50) booked a solid 10% gain since December, while CNN (#32) saw a 1.6% gain. The number of unique visitors to CNet, however, dropped by almost 13% compared to December, and is down 24% year-over-year.

Twitter, which registered a solid 294% year-over-year growth, only saw a 3.35% growth since December.

Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, is now the eleventh most-visited site. It's worth noting that the combination of Live.com and Bing.com attracted around 133 million unique visitors in January 2010, which is on par with Facebook's and Yahoo's numbers.

Back in April, the service became one of the top three Internet video providers, alongside Google - which includes YouTube and Google Video - and Fox, according to comScore. Kilar includes a number of statistics in his note to show that the site has continued its climb in popularity during the rest of 2009.

Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year.

Hulu's content library doubled over the past year. We now offer over 14,000 hours of premium content, up from 5,600 hours at this time last year."

The addition of Disney as a content partner last April surely provided a traffic boost, as the ABC owner brought television sensations like "Lost", "Grey's Anatomy" and other prime-time hits to the site.

A live video of Obama's inauguration topped the list of embedded videos for 2009, while "Saturday Night Live", "Family Guy", "The Office", "The Simpsons" and "Naruto Shippuden" were the most popular shows of the year.

But what was the overall winner for 2009 on Hulu, you might be wondering? A decidedly NSFW SNL short called "Motherlover".

For those of you who still haven't made the digital television switch but still want to watch, Hulu will be streaming the ball drop in Times Square tonight starting at 10 pm EST.

98% of All Computer Users in the U.S. are Online

The number of adults who are online has not changed since 2007. In total, 184 million adults regularly surf the Internet at work, home or school. While the number of adults who are online has not changed, the number of adults who access the Internet at home has increased from 66% in 2005 to 76% in 2009. Ten years ago, only 56% of all adults accessed the Internet from home. In total, 98% of all computer users are now online.

While users between 30 and 39 are the most active Internet users, those between 25 and 29 are the most likely to spend more than 24 hours per week online. 25% of 25- to 29-year-olds surf the Net between 24 and 162 hours per week - sadly, Harris Interactive doesn't tell us how many of these users actually spend every minute of the week online.

Online Shopping

With regards to online shopping, Harris found that 50% of adults bought something online in the last month. Not surprisingly, 30- to 39-year-olds are the most active online shoppers.

How High Will These Numbers Go?

Given how popular online video and social networks have become over the last few years, chances are that the average number of hours spend online will continue to grow slowly over the next few years. U.S. Internet users who watch TV online watch close to 18 hours of online video per week already. In the U.K., the average Facebook user spends close to three full days per year on the site. Without doubt, however, there will be a natural limit to how much time per week people will spend online.

How to See these Stats

Getting to this data isn't easy, though. First of all, you have to use AdSense for feed or FeedBurner to track this data. Then, in Google Analytics, you have to go to Traffic Sources and click on All Traffic Sources. After this, you still have to filter your traffic by entering 'feedburner' in the search box at the bottom of the page. In the Campaigns view you can also filter stats by 'feedburner.'

In today's announcement, Google explains how to customize the way FeedBurner tags clicks it sends to Google Analytics. Google plans to create more endpoints for FeedBurner data in the near future.

More to Come

FeedBurner users will be happy to hear that Google plans to release more features in FeedBurner that will take advantage of this new functionality in the coming weeks. FeedBurner had been lying dormant for quite a while. Today's announcement hopefully signals the end of this stage in FeedBurner's development.