Disqus
If you’re a Symbian OS user, you’ll be happy to know that your smartphone operating system of choice has at least one leg-up on the iPhone OS. The Symbian smartphone platform sends 2.7 times the number of mobile advertising clicks as the iPhone OS! No other OS even comes close to the mobile ad click-through rates – the holy grail metric used by all advertisers since the inception of clickable ads – achieved by the ancient platform backed by mobile phone maker Nokia. This should give advertisers reason to rethink their advertising strategy in the face of the iPhone iAd advertising service soon to be offered by Apple.
The stats come from mobile ad company Smaato, and covers advertising click-through rates for the US during April 2010. The report shows that Symbian users are most likely to click on a mobile ad, with iPhone users coming in a distant second. Feature phones barely edge out Windows Phone users for third place, with Windows Mobile managing to hold onto an average fourth place click-through rate. Android users are fifth most likliest to click on mobile ads, with Palm users following a close sixth. BlackBerry users apparently almost never click on mobile ads – almost 40% less likely than Palm users.
Interestingly, click-through rates for the Symbian OS increased from February to March, as did feature phones and Windows Phones (Windows Mobile smartphones). Palm and BlackBerry have seen their click-through numbers declining in that same time period, with Android leading the drop in mobile advertising clicks. In fact, Android suffered an almost 50% drop in mobile ad clicks from February to March. The iPhone, meanwhile, showed mostly flat click-through performance through the January, February and March months.
What’s the point? Well, it seems that, contrary to what Steve Jobs and his magical hype-machine would have you believe, the future of mobile advertising may not be in the iPhone OS or iAds. Sure, iAds is set to redefine what mobile ads should look like and how they should engage the user, but advertisers are mostly concerned with what makes cents – dollars and cents (excuse the pun). For that all-important metric, Symbian is the clear winner today. Although, this isn’t the first we’ve heard of Apple’s iAds platform boosting a competitor’s numbers. The question is – how will Symbian click-through rates fare when Symbian ^3 goes live later this year?
That’s not to say that iAds and the iPhone won’t rocket to the top of these charts later in the year and through the next. What’s interesting is that the aging Symbian platform manages to garner click-through rates that far exceed what its closest smartphone competitor can scrounge together. Especially considering that it’s usually more difficult to click on ads with a Symbian-powered phone. The results might have something to do with Symbian’s more enthusiastic user base or the fact that mobile advertisers have had almost a decade to figure out their plan of attack on Symbian.
You can download the full Smaato report here.
[Via: GigaOm]
About The Author
Will Park
Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...
