Last week Opera released its State of Mobile Advertising report for Q2. Headlines on coverage tended to focus on the finding that “the first app of the day is in the Social Networking category, and the most common last app of the day is for Entertainment.”
Interesting, but not surprising. The report also explores the familiar horse race between iOS and Android. Android leads but underperforms iOS relative to its share.
Last quarter Android devices surpassed iOS globally in terms of traffic and revenue generation; Android has had the traffic lead for some time. As an aside, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech recently reported that the iPhone had lost some share in the US, while growing in Europe’s five major markets.
In the Opera data, the iOS-Android revenue gap is less than a point between the two platforms (chart above). What’s noteworthy is that the iPhone generates less than a third of the traffic of Android smartphones but almost 75 percent of the revenue.
All iOS devices outperform in terms of revenues generated vs. traffic. In particular, the iPad generates the most ad revenue per device relative to its traffic share.
More interesting than the revenue vs. traffic numbers are the data comparing app- and Web-based ad impressions by continent. On the one extreme, in the graphic immediately below, Africa shows little app penetration vs. the mobile Web. At the other end, the US market sees more than 90 percent of ad impressions in apps.
It would be interesting to see Europe segmented by markets. My guess would be that the “big five” countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) would overall show more in-app impressions. It would also be interesting to see APAC segmented by market (i.e., China, Korea, Japan).
The question in my mind is whether there’s a pattern. As markets mature and apps become more widely available, is there a migration from mobile Web to apps? The data above don’t clearly suggest an answer.
In the aggregate, according to Opera, apps see more traffic/impressions and considerably more ad revenue than the mobile Web on a global basis.
The chart below is also striking. It indicates the percentage of total mobile advertising that is video in eight countries. Egypt has the lowest percentage of video advertising as a share of total mobile advertising, and Australia has the highest video ad penetration.
There are many bullish video advertising forecasts circulating. The chart appears to support them, suggesting that in the US there’s a lot of potential room for video advertising growth.
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