Flurry Analytics published a study today that shows just how effective in-app advertising is as compared to television or Internet ads. While the reach of television and Internet advertising peak during specific parts of the day, ads found in apps for iOS and Android had a much more consistent reach from morning to evening.
You can see the large curves on the chart above presented in the television and Internet advertising study do not appear in the data for in-app advertising. Between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., the audience share for ads on TV jumps from roughly 33 percent all the way up to around 63 percent. That’s a large amount of people to begin watching television in just a three-hour timeframe. From 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., the audience share for ads on the Internet also increases quite a bit from about 22 percent to 40 percent.
There are no such jumps in usage for iOS and Android apps. From 7 in the morning all the way to 9 at night, the increase in advertising effectiveness is just 28 percent — specifically from 23 percent to 51 percent. Advertisers benefit greatly from this information, since they don’t need to worry as much about when during the day ads are displayed.
Here’s another interesting tidbit from Flurry:
To put the sheer size of the mobile application audience into perspective, consider that the American Idol finale, which airs once per season, reaches approximately 20 million viewers on that day. Mobile apps already reach more than 20 million U.S. consumers per hour, from 7 am to 11 pm. That’s already the equivalent of 17 American Idol finales each day, or more than 6,200 American Idol finales per year.
Apple launched iAd last year as part of iOS 4 to provide a better experience for both advertisers and consumers. Clearly it saw the untapped potential in mobile app advertising, and now so can we.