Android market share surpasses Windows Mobile for the first time ever according to AdMob
By Stefan Constantinescu on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 6:02 AM PST In Android, Windows Mobile
AdMob, which is an ad network used on over mobile 7,000 websites and over 2,500 applications, serves over 7 billion ad requests per month. Parsing through that data, they’ve noticed that Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Android operating system has grown by 25% compared to the previous month and as such has reached 5% global market share, making it bigger than Windows Mobile for the first time. Ever. Other interesting statistics: over half of the ad requests coming from the iPhone and iPod touch came from the USA, the top 5 handsets that ads are being served to around the world are the iPhone, iPod Touch, Samsung R450, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N70 and Motorola (NYSE: MOT) RAZR V3. View the complete, 19 page PDF report, to satisfy your hunger for statistics, but take these numbers with a grain of salt. There are other ad networks out there, most notably Google AdSense, and the > 7,000 websites that AdMob caters to may have a heavy USA regional bias. I highly doubt there are more Android users out there than Windows Mobile users.
[Via: Venture Beat]
I always get annoyed when I see these AdMob stats. First, they monitor mobile web sites. If you happen to have a ph that allows you to view standard rather than mobile web sites (i.e. almost every phone out there sans the iphone), you don’t count. Second, they look at ad-driven apps. Again, a metric that is heavily weighted to Apple’s advantage. I’d be curious to see just how many of those 2500 apps are only available in the App Store. WinMo, Symbian, and RIM are still outselling Apple globally, but their users clearly don’t use the web at all?!? It seems to me, these stats are absolutely meaningless unless you have an iphone.
To sum up, if you prefer using Skyfire to see the real web rather than the mobile web from your handset, you don’t count. If you download apps that are not ad-driven, you don’t count. Unless you have an iphone or your browser set for mobile pages rather than standard web pages (an option Apple does not even allow it’s users to make), you don’t count. Again, these stats are absolutely meaningless.
There are more ways than AdMob to measure web traffic with mobile phones. Even the ones that go by standard sites such as Net Applications show an overwhelming number of iPhone and iPod touch users browsing the web in comparison to other platforms.
The effect is diminished when you factor it on a global scale, but the Apple mobile combo still registers at the top.
It’s about more than the number of devices in circulation. It’s about whether or not the users of those devices are browsing the web. Most BlackBerries in the wild have tiny, terrible screens and are navigated crudely with the keyboard and sub-menus. Most Windows Mobile phones are just as cumbersome. They may be sold but the people who own them don’t care for browsing the internet because it’s not worth the effort. I’ve owned them hoping to have the mobile web only to be disappointed, so I know the feeling.
Therefore when it comes to browsing metrics, Apple has the advantage because their users actually enjoy the web browser on the iPhone and iPod touch.