iPhone – Boon to Admob?

Last year, I wrote an entry which looked at AdMob’s monthly Mobile Metrics report and concluded that smart phone platforms from Nokia, RIM and Windows Mobile had a higher share of ads served compared to that of Apple’s iPhone.  I pointed out that this was not consistent with the browsing market share numbers reported by Net Applications. Well, iPhone has addressed that discrepancy to leave absolutely no doubt whatsover! Just take a look at the March 2009 report from AdMob (left). I have included the March 2008 report (right) as well for easy comparison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The iPhone and iPod Touch together have a 22% share (more than the rest of the 18 platforms listed in the table) of the 7.65B ad requests made to AdMob – the distant third is the Motorola RAZR platform with a 2.7% share. Contrast this with March 2008 when the RAZR platform had a 5.6% share of ~2.86B ad requests. It is clear that the phenomenal success of Apple’s AppStore has a lot to do with the dominance of the Apple platforms. In fact, AdMob reports that applications have had a big impact on the growth of mobile data usage. According to AdMob, in March 2009, more than half of the total number of ad requests for the iPhone came from applications. It is clear that applications (especially the free variety) provide a tremendous opportunity to drive mobile advertising and will benefit ad networks such as AdMob.

Is Mobile Broadband Profitable?

The consensus opinion is certainly that mobile broadband is not a profitable business (yet)  in Western Europe (especially in countries like UK) where mobile broadband prices are trending lower than fixed broadband prices. I have always wanted to do a quantitative analysis. 

The analyst firm Informa claims that fixed-line costs in Europe are near Eurocent 0.1-0.5 per MB, compared with Eurocent 2-3 for mobile networks. We can use this number to compare the cost basis for various operators’ quota-based mobile broadband packages. For example, 3 UK’s package is as follows:

So if you use the 2 Eurocent per MB number, 1 GB costs ~20 Euros (or 18 pounds) significantly more than the 10 pounds that 3 seems to be charging for the 1 GB package.  Assuming a user who signs up for a 7 GB package uses ~2 GB, the cost for 3 to support that user is ~36 pounds which is still a lot higher than 25 pounds. I am not sure about you, but I sure don’t see how 3 is making money on these mobile broadband packages.