Stats show iPhone leads the way for ads – or perhaps not?

AdMob iPhone figures contrast with Smaato numbers on click through rates

The rise of the iPhone on AdMob’s ad network appears unabated, with the share of requests from iPhones rising from 33% in February 2009 to 50% of all requests in February 2010.

Android too showed an increase, from 2% in 2009 to 24% in February 2010. 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.

Requests from Symbian phones dropped from 43% in February 2009 to 18% in February 2010.

Smartphones overall grew from 35% to 48% of all requests to the network, from February to February. Feature phone share dropped from 58% to 35% year on year, although volumes of traffic from feature phones actually grew 31% over the period.

Yet before you get the idea that iPhone = more ads viewed, it’s worth pointing out that these figures appear to be somewhat at odds with those of mobile advertising company Smaato, who produced its own February metrics on 5 March. Smaato’s results were based upon 35 mobile ad networks and over 4 billion ad requests served in the Smaato Network of more than 3000 registered mobile publishers in February 2010.

Smaato’s figures show that when it comes to click through rates (CTRs) across the ad networks it monitors, CTRs on iPhone across the world dropped for the second month running. For the first time Apple devices have dipped below the average Index of 100 and also below the CTRs generated by Windows Mobile devices.

Smaato ranked Symbian as the top performing OS for CTRs, with Android second.

So what is going on? On one side, AdMob reports that 50% of all smartphone requests come from the iPhone, a number that’s up from 33% year on year. On the other side, analysis of 35 ad networks shows that the iPhone sits behind Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile in terms of CTRs.

The easiest conclusion to draw is that AdMob’s network is very heavily skewed towards the iPhone, given its US base, and also its deep penetration into iPhone applications and sites heavily visited by iPhone users.

When you look at the wider picture, and the past couple of months asopposed to year on year figures, its possible to draw some rather different conclusions about the dominance of the iPhone OS in served mobile ads.