Another tidbit from that Nielsen survey last week is that a whooping 33% of Android users had opened an in-application advertisement in the last 30 days. The other platforms trailed at 29% of Windows Mobile users, 26% for iPhone owners, 24% in other (presumably made up mostly of feature phones), 22% of Palm OS users, and a mere 15% of BlackBerry users. I suspect that the reason half as many BlackBerry owners click mobile apps is because they know it’ll launch the browser.The demographic data showed that 58% of teens said they always or sometimes look at mobile ads, a figure which shrinks to 28% for respondents 55 and over. There was also some interesting information about how many were paying for their apps; on iPhone, there was two free apps for every paid, but for Android and BlackBerry, that ratio was 3.5 to 1. BlackBerry users were also the least likely to go from a lite app to a premium one.
It still boggles me that the click-throughs for mobile ads on Windows Mobile devices is still so notably higher than the other platforms. Are the ads especially well-targeted, or are they super-shiny, or what? I can’t remember the last time I used a Windows Mobile phone in earnest, so rightly couldn’t say one way or the other. It would certainly work to Microsoft’s advantage if they can keep that click-through rate up in Windows Phone 7, but it may be yet another one of the few advantages the platform had that they wipe away for the sake of a fresh start. Android already has a huge head start in mobile advertising considering Google’s history with web ads, and simply none of the other platforms will have the same leverage, no matter what they try.
[via MediaPost]