We have some more market stats on mobile data use. This time our info hasn’t come from an operator, but from AdMob, which has been tracking ad impressions on its network by device.
In terms of overall impressions, the AdMob Network itself saw impressions were up 4.5% November over October to 1,722,213,245. The growth was driven by Western Europe and North America, Jason Spero, vp marketing said.
Other headliners were that the iPhone “dramatically over-indexes on usage share compared with unit share”. In the USA iPhones were responsible for 6.45 million ad impressions in November (from a US total of 725 million), nearly 2.5 million more than in October.
The top devices in AdMob's top 4 markets remained the same: USA (Motorola KRZR), India (Nokia 6030), South Africa (Motorola v360) and the UK (SonyEricsson K800i), although Nokia N Series devices are showing growth too.
For ad market watchers, the USA comprises about 42% of all Admob’s impessions, Asia 25% and Western Europe 11%. The biggest users in Europe appear to be the UK, Romania and Serbia & Montenegro.
Worldwide, Nokia devices accounted for 28.5% of all impressions in November with Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Samsung all pretty close to each other at around the 10-11% mark. In the USA, however, Motorola topped the chart at 17.5% with Nokia handsets back in fourth place on 9.2%, behind Samsung and RIM.
We need to add a couple of caveats to these stats. They don’t necessarily represent the whole mobile internet. They represent activity on Admob’s own network – and AdMob’s traffic is driven by publisher relationship. And for some handsets and operator networks, it is difficult to collect full handset data. AdMob categorizes these requests as "unclassified" and does not serve targeted ads to these requests. Unclassified data has been omitted from the handset data in this report. Approximately 2% of requests are unclassified by geography and approximately 11% of requests are unclassified by handset.