Who’s Right on the Smartphone OS Mix?
November 23, 2009
Filed Under: in Analysis, Mobile, iPhone
Author: Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
Welcome back.
Earlier today, Erick Schonfeld over at Techcrunch wrote up a release from AdMob disclosing Smartphone OS marketshare (measured by impressions). In their report, Admob showed that a monstrous 55% of all smartphone requests came from devices on the iPhone OS, while Android made up 20% and RIM a measly 12%.
Interestingly, earlier today Sean P. Aune posted his regular Mobile Monday report that included data from the SMART report released every month from one of our sponsors Millennial Media, which contained some starkly contrasting data.
In the Millennial Media report, they showed that the iPhone consists of only 33% of monthly impressions, RIM following closely at 31%, and Android at a measly 8%.
We got a short missive from Millinnial this morning, and they said that internal reports they’ve received from Comscore back up this data, as does Nielsen. We’ve put in calls to both analysis firms to confirm and are awaiting reports of verification (which we may not get until tomorrow), but given the old data I’ve reviewed on the web, the Millennial numbers certainly seem more plausible.
If you look at this Comscore data from May of this year, it tells a similar story to what Millennial is claiming.
They show RIM with the greatest marketshare, at 38%, Windows with 27%, and Android and iPhone at 2% and 21% respectively.
Certainly things have shifted since then, but for iPhone to explode to 55% past all competitors since then would be truly remarkable.
Hopefully the third parties will respond soon and give us some illumination on this disparity. Right now, AdMob looks like the odd man out on their statistical data, but we’ll see when the numbers come in.
Busienssweek has a good story on the smartphone advertising race http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/11/google_to_promp.html
Look for Millennial Media to be acquired next speculates Businessweek (as did we a month ago)
Hey Mark! Sorry to misuse comments for a moment, couldn't find ur email. Which I totally understand / sympathize with. A few things - Like the re-design! How is "sponsored comment" working out? I'd not seen it before. Thanks for sharing some of my rants with your strange post-it thingy recently.
Found a 404 on your about page, The Guy guy on SiliconAngleTV: http://siliconangle.com/ver2/siliconangletv/2009/08/12/guy-kawasaki-mike-moritz-and-paul-graham-talk-frankly-on-ideas-and-passion/
Neither is right and neither is wrong. This data is based on advertising impressions. It is subjective. Different networks, with different business models, will always get different results. BuzzCity, InMobi, Quattro, Nokia, AOL etc etc will all get different results. AdMob does more advertising in iPhone-only applications than others which skews its results to iPhones.
Other networks don’t place the same weight on impressions by handset as AdMob, so haven’t tended to pimp it in the same way. Hopefully Millennial isn’t jumping on the bandwagon and has just done this to show that mobile ad networks aren’t the best placed to dictate handset market share. Handset market share is best judged by sale of handsets.
The silly thing is that mobile ad networks could actually tell us so much valuable information about the behavior of mobile users, but commentators have become obsessed by what handsets are downloading the most adverts, which makes it very tempting for networks to pimp this data. If you want to know more about the different mobile ad networks, I recommend this guide: http://www.mobithinking.com/mobile-ad-network-guide