Facebook and YouTube responsible for over a third of mobile traffic

Ever wondered how much mobile traffic those two behemoths of the mobile (and indeed desktop) world, Facebook and YouTube actually use?

Well, as far as North American traffic goes -- as measured by a Sandvine report compiled by BI Intelligence for Business Insider -- in September, Facebook accounted for 19 percent of mobile traffic, and YouTube snagged almost as much at 18 percent.

So combined, the two have 37 percent of traffic, well over a third of total mobile traffic, at least in the American market.

General traffic through a mobile web browser was in third place, considerably behind on 11 percent, followed by streamed video on 6 percent, and encrypted traffic on 5 percent. The next biggest service was Instagram, tied with Netflix and Google Cloud on 4 percent, ahead of iTunes and Pandora on 3 percent.

A recent Sandvine report from November entitled "Global Internet Phenomena Report 2H 2014" noted that Facebook video autoplay sparked a major increase in mobile usage, and indeed prompted a jump in average subscriber usage by up to 60 percent on mobile.

That report also pegged Netflix as the leading video streaming service in North America by far, with 35 percent of downstream traffic in the peak evening hours compared to Amazon Instant Video’s 2.6 percent.

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