Revisiting iPhone’s Browsing Market Share – Part Deux

Back in September, I reported that according to Admob, a mobile advertising marketplace, iPhone seemed to trail Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Palm handsets in both worldwide and US share of smartphone traffic. This was in direct contrast to other web browsing marketshare statistics where iPhone seemingly comes out on top. I also received hate-mail from iPhone-junkies. But looks like there is an explanation. Jason Spero, VP of Marketing at AdMob proffers an explanation:

With regards to the iPhone question: we serve ads on our partner’s mobile sites, so when the users surf the “regular” web on the iPhone that traffic isn’t included in the Metrics report. Much of the tremendous growth we are seeing in iPhone requests are coming from the creation of iPhone specific mobile sites. This traffic is included in the report and these sites represent a growing part of AdMob’s business. As content owners look to improve the mobile experience, we believe more and more mobile specific sites will be created and the mobile web will continue its strong growth in the face of more handsets having the ability to surf the “regular” web.

One additional point of clarification – the report doesn’t state that a Motorola RAZR user is more likely to surf the mobile web that an iPhone user, it simply states that our publisher sites see more traffic from RAZRs than iPhones. The mobile web existed and was seeing explosive growth well before the iPhone hit the scene –many millions of these devices are still in heavy use today.

The short answer is that regular web-surfing (which is what most iPhone users do, I reckon) is not included in AdMob’s report. The AdMob-reported iPhone numbers refer to ads served out by AdMob when users visit iPhone specific mobile sites. 

According to AdMob’s September report, iPhone is giving the other platforms a run for their money even here! iPhone is now ranked 4th globally in terms of the total number of ad requests served by AdMob -ahead of Nokia N95/N80/N73, BlackBerry 8100/8300 and Pal Centro. Only Motorola’s RAZR/KRZR and Nokia N70 is ahead and not by much. 

Revisiting iPhone’s Browsing Market Share

AdMob, a mobile advertising marketplace releases what they call a Mobile Metrics Report every month. Since they serve ads for more than 5,000 mobile web sites around the world, they claim they are capable of storing and analyzing the data from every ad request, impression, and click. For every ad request, AdMob determines device capabilities using information available in the user’s mobile browser. They claim that over 5 million ad requests and impressions flow through their network every month. The reports reveal some interesting data regarding worldwide share of smartphone traffic. Contrary to popular opinion (and even here in this blog), the iPhone is nowhere close to holding the top spot in this list. Nokia’s Symbian OS takes that honor on a worldwide basis, while out here in the States, RIM’s BlackBerry browser takes the top spot. In fact, as the accompanying charts show, while Symbian’s (driven primarily by Nokia’s N-Series handsets) market share has been steadily growing from 44% to 64% on a worldwide basis in the past six months, iPhone’s share has been hovering around in the 4%-6% category. Not a bad number for a platform that has been in existence for hardly over a year, but a far cry from the market share numbers reported by Net Applications. In fact, even if you assume that Net Applications measure browsing statistics only in the United States, their numbers are not consistent with what is shown here – RIM, Windows Mobile and Palm handsets all have a higher share of Internet traffic to that of the iPhone.