AdMob's metrics report: Smartphones now account for half of AdMob traffic

AdMob’s metrics report is out today and there’s some interesting stats to ponder.

The first point to consider:

In February 2010, smartphones accounted for 48 percent of AdMob’s worldwide traffic, up from 35 percent in February 2009.

More and more people are upgrading their shitphones to Smartphones. This can only be good news for the marketplace.

The strong growth of iPhone and Android traffic, fueled by heavy application usage, was primarily responsible for increase. Although the share of feature phone traffic in AdMob’s network declined from 58 percent to 35 percent year-over-year, absolute traffic from feature phones still grew 31 percent. Mobile Internet devices experienced the strongest growth of the three categories, increasing to account for 17 percent of traffic in AdMob’s network in February 2010. The iPod touch is the top mobile Internet device and is responsible for vast majority of this traffic, other devices include the Sony PSP and Nintendo DSi.

Highlights from the February 2010 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report include:

iPhone OS increased its share of smartphone requests from 33 percent in February 2009 to 50 percent in February 2010.

That’s pretty impressive — but to be expected given AdMob’s heavy emphasis toward the platform. Good news for publishers and advertising chasing iPhone users!

Next up, Symbian…

Symbian’s share of smartphone requests fell from 43 percent in February 2009 to 18 percent in February 2010.

This is why Nokia and Symbian is viewed as more or less irrelevant by much of the American media and application developer space. It is perhaps to be expected, given the reach AdMob has embedded on applications and on sites heavily frequented by iPhone/Android users. Let’s look at Android:

Android increased its share from two percent in February 2009 to 24 percent in February 2010.

That’s pretty dramatic, given the number of handsets that shipped last year.

Now let’s get some more Android focused perspective:

The top five Android devices worldwide, by traffic, were the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Hero, HTC Magic, and the Motorola CLIQ. The Google Nexus One only generated one percent of total Android traffic in February 2010.

And now a nod to the rest of the marketplace:

Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and LG were the top manufacturers of feature phones. Top feature phones from each manufacturer in AdMob’s network were the Samsung SCH R350, Nokia 3110c, Sony Ericsson W200i, Motorola RAZR V3, and LG CU920.

[Note: Do remember that AdMob’s stats, whilst indicative, are based on being able to track users viewing AdMob inventory. So if you visit Mobile Industry Review on your mobile, you’re being tracked by AdMob (since we carry ads there) but if you *ONLY* visit The Application Review on your mobile, you won’t be tracked and your usage won’t be included in AdMob’s metrics. So do keep a pinch of salt around when you’re evaluating the stats in the context of the whole industry.]

You can pick up the full report here.