Holiday Tablet Traffic Jumps 229%

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--If you didn’t get a tablet this holiday season, you may be one of the few. According to Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising, tablet network traffic jumped 229 percent over an average projected for the day after Christmas, based on historical network traffic. January 2, 2012 also saw a bump, with a 263 percentage traffic increase – most likely from recipients uploading holiday photos and getting familiar with their devices. In its newly released January MobileSTAT, Jumptap found that the Kindle Fire experienced the greatest tablet growth throughout December. The new device held 10 percent of tablet market share on December 1 and finished the year with 30 percent market share. This year-end surge suggests a 2012 trend for lower-priced tablets.

“The surge in tablet adoption rates and rise in mobile subscribers support the expectations that mobile will eventually outpace online.”

In 2011, the mobile ad industry broke the billion dollar barrier for the first time. With expectation for significant growth over the next three years, the Jumptap January MobileSTAT looked back at online ad spending for a historic benchmark. Online ad spending surpassed the $1 billion mark in 1998, followed by hockey stick growth that outpaced what analysts had predicted. This month analysts at eMarketer changed their predictions about mobile ad spending growth, estimating the market would be roughly $6.5B by 2014, much higher than their September 2010 estimate of $2.5B by 2014. Jumptap’s side by side comparison with what analysts originally predicted for the online ad market shows that even higher estimates for mobile may be conservative.

“Mobile is quickly becoming the primary access point of the internet. Advertisers have seen this movie before with PC based digital advertising and are allocating mobile budgets that are larger and larger,” said Paran Johar, Chief Marketing Officer, Jumptap. “The surge in tablet adoption rates and rise in mobile subscribers support the expectations that mobile will eventually outpace online.”

In 2011 Android and iOS continued to battle for mobile OS share. When the dust cleared, Android had beaten iOS. The January MobileSTAT found that Android’s share grew 21 percentage points (38 percent in December ’10 to 59 percent in December ’11), while iOS dropped 7 percentage points (29 percent in December ’10 to 22 percent in December ’11). iOS may have lost the share battle this year, but not without a valiant fight – iOS tripled in overall traffic on the Jumptap network of more than 95 million unique visitors, while Android more than quadrupled. This should be a lesson to marketers – both operating systems are growing at break-neck speeds and a cross-platform approach is essential to reach their audience.

More broadly, the January MobileSTAT report revealed new data about the app vs. mobile web balance, OS click-through rates, and targeting.

MobileSTAT smartphone findings:

In addition to faster adoption, newer iOS versions see higher click-through rates than their Android counterparts. iOS5, the latest version of the Apple OS, has a CTR of approximately .91 percent, while the latest Android OS, 3.x, has a .59 percent CTR.
The app vs. mobile web debate still has many industry players picking sides. The January MobileSTAT shows that both are growing at similar rates with no signs of slowing. For marketers trying to decide whether to build an app or mobile site, the answer clearly depends on the audiences they’re looking to target.

MobileSTAT (Simple Targeting & Audience Trends) is a monthly view of the top targeting and audience trends in mobile advertising. Jumptap strives to better understand mobile audience and educate the entire mobile ecosystem through its insight reports. MobileSTAT contains analysis of hundreds of gigabytes of log data, run through Jumptap’s analytics technology. To download a full copy of the Jumptap MobileSTAT report, visit jumptap.com/STAT.

Reporting Methodology

The results of the Jumptap MobileSTAT report are derived from large quantities of network data to identify targeting and audience trends. Jumptap uses proprietary algorithms to analyze and normalize this data. In some cases, when sufficient conditions are met, subsets of data may have been used as proxies to represent the overall network.

About Jumptap

Jumptap is the leader in targeted mobile advertising. Reaching 95 million mobile users in the U.S. and 142 million mobile users worldwide, Jumptap uses its extensive technology portfolio, as well as industry-first partnerships with third- party data providers, to understand mobile audiences better than any other ad network and provide intelligent targeting with scale. Through its large network of premium publishers and apps, and constant campaign optimization, Jumptap delivers the best ROI for advertisers and highest yield for publishers and developers. Jumptap has pioneered mobile advertising privacy standards and is committed to unlocking mobile opportunities for all parties through its ongoing industry research, such as its Understanding Mobile Audience series and monthly MobileSTAT report. Visit http://www.jumptap.com and http://www.jumptap.com/blog for more information; join our Facebook community, follow us on Twitter at @Jumptap and check out our latest ads at the Jumptap Ad Gallery http://www.jumptap.com/gallery.

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