Millennial
Media's November 2010 Mobile Mix report is now available. The report
provides the latest trends for connected devices, mobile manufacturers,
operating systems, and mobile applications.
This Month's Highlights
- Three Connected Devices (non-phone Wi-Fi devices) placed in the Top 30 Mobile Devices/Smartphones for the second consecutive month. The Apple iPod Touch secured the number two position.
- Apple's iPhone is followed by the Motorola Droid, BlackBerry Curve, Samsung Freeform, Samsung Vibrant, iPad, BlackBerry Bold 2, Droid X, and Sanyo Incognito.
- Android applications represented 54% of the
Application Platform Mix, averaging 10% growth month-over-month for the
past four consecutive months. - Samsung held the number two position in the Top 15
Manufacturers' list and had the highest number of devices in the Top 30
Mobile Device rankings. Samsung is followed by Motorola, BlackBerry, HTC, LG, Nokia, Sanyo, Kyocera and Sony Ericsson. - Motorola maintained the number three position in the Top 15 Manufacturers for the second consecutive month and held a 15% impression share. The two newest Motorola
devices, the Droid 2 and the Droid X, both moved up on the Top 30 Mobile Device list in November, with the Droid 2 up seven spots from last month.
- RIM BlackBerry smartphones represented five of the Top 30 Mobile Devices on the network, with a combined impression share of 11% in November.
- Music & Entertainment applications moved up to the number two
position with 22% of the impression share. Television & Movie app
impressions more than doubled month-over-month, but Music apps still
lead the category. - Automotive applications entered the Top Mobile Application
Categories list for the first time. Automotive app impressions more than
tripled month-over-month, reflecting the increased use of mobile by
consumers as they researched new auto purchases and end-of-year
promotions. - Feature Phones and Connected Devices experienced a 1% and 2%
increase in impression share month-over-month. Collectively, they
represented 42% of impressions in November.
If you were wondering why such ad metrics reports always seem to be massively out of kilter with the actual market share of handsets, then you should know this. These reports don’t show that iPhone users and Android users surf more than people with other handsets (they may do, but these reports don’t prove that), and they certainly don’t show market share (only sales data shows that), it merely shows that people with iPhones and Androids are shown more ads than people with other handsets. Mobile ad networks are very good at targeting particular geographies, demographics, handsets etc. And at the moment advertisers are very keen to target iPhone and Android, partly because of the demographic, partly because of all the media hype, partly because of charts like this, but also because there are loads of companies that are desperately trying to promote apps that people don’t really want. Don’t get me wrong there are lots of great apps and great success stories, but many apps are just pointless and instead of writing off the development cost as an expensive education, companies then spend an additional fortune promoting the app. Clearly there’s no point promoting the app to anything other than the only phone that the app works on, either within more successful apps or on the mobile Web and that skews the charts… a lot. It’s all part of the false economy around vanity apps, it’s explained at length here: http://www.mobithinking.com/blog/vanity-apps