ok, so if there was one graph that made the rounds the last couple of days, it must have been this one:
admob’s US mobile OS traffic shares. the graph was posted in an arstechnica story looking at the mobile OS market space. internationally there were no surprises but for the US the admob numbers seem to have offered a surprise.
and the surprise is visualized by the ascent of the green line which represents the android line. according the ars story this is how the admob data is being collected:
AdMob uses ad requests for ads from its network as its primary metric. Since these requests come from both mobile websites as well as apps that use AdMob ads, it’s important to consider what AdMob data shows. Unlike traditional market share measured in units sold, AdMob’s data could best be characterized as usage data; that is, AdMob’s statistics show that platforms like iPhone OS or Android are used more often than others online, far more often than their relative market share by sales might suggest.
so i admit that i am a longtime apple fan (although i am not using an iphone), but i also admit that overall this doesn’t come as a surprise (afterall, google, like microsoft, goes for mass markets and in order to get there they open up the OS and the platforms). what comes as a surprise is the speed. the droid most certainly is a success (for both verizon and motorola … although i still have my doubts it will be the live saver for motorola that they are hoping for) and htc has flooded the market with android phones, each new one slightly different from the others. ultimately what all these phones have done is to spread touchscreen phones with good browsers and bigger screens beyond the att domain.
back to those lines on the graphs. here is why i am a bit skeptical about those numbers:
- the story says that admob also hosts in app ads, but i have to admit that i have rarely seen any. facebook app for example, has none. which leads me to my point that i think that most of the traffic admob is seeing is browser based, and iphone users have moved beyond the browser. when i had my iphone i can’t recall using the browser a lot. i pretty much used targeted apps for finding flight info (tripit … don’t recall ads on that) to using the bofa app rather than going to their site.
- the spike in the middle of last year shows that once you have new users there is a spike in traffic … people want to justify the cost for the phone, and play around with it all the time. the android market is still new so people are still discovering the phones and spending a larger amount of time on the network … once those users get used to their phones their usage will mellow out.
overall though i think those numbers show that apple’s iphone app market is the main difference and iphone users are more likely to abandon the browser based web in favor of a faster, more targeted mobile internet experience that is apps based. as the google app market is growing it will be interesting to see how those numbers develop.