AdMob pegs Android as No. 2 mobile Web platform in the U.S.

I used to work in market research, so I’m always skeptical of data until I understand how it’s measured. That’s why I was surprised with this headline from TechCrunch: “Apple and Android Now Make Up 75 Percent of U.S. Smartphone Web Traffic.” More specifically, I was surprised how large Android’s share was in this reported data. I absolutely believe Android will grow in significance in the future; today is a different story.

To the casual reader, the title of the TechCrunch report, along with the accompanying pie charts, suggested that the iPhone and Android accounted for, respectively, 55 and 20 percent of the U.S. smartphone market. These results position the iPhone and Android at No. 1 and 2 in U.S. smartphone Web traffic.

[ Google is making waves all over the mobile landscape, as Savio Rodrigues points out in “Google gPhone, friend and foe to Android phone vendors” | Stay up to speed with the open source community via InfoWorld’s Technology: Open Source newsletter. ]

Digging a little deeper, AdMob clearly explains how it arrives at the data: “The report is based on the ad requests we receive from our network of more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and iPhone and Android applications.”

I couldn’t find details that split the “15,000” figure between mobile Web sites and mobile device-specific applications. Mobile Web sites that serve information to any device seems like a logical way to measure mobile Web traffic. On the other hand, iPhone and Android applications will definitely increase the Web traffic counted in the iPhone and Android buckets accordingly. This is not to say that AdMob’s data or methodology is flawed. Rather, it’s helpful to know what was actually measured and how.

I went back to the October 2008 results and found that over the past year, the number of mobile sites and applications has increased 150 percent from 6,000 to 15,000. I’d love to understand how the additional 9,000 “mobile sites and applications” added in 2009 split across mobile sites versus iPhone or Android applications. There has been an explosion in iPhone applications, so it’s not hard to assume that AdMob is tracking a higher percentage of iPhone applications in its data collection network in 2009 versus 2008.

Another factoid that surprised me, over the past year, the number of requests tracked by AdMob has increased 127 percent from 2.2 billion to 5 billion in the United States. The mobile Web is still in its infancy, and it’ll be interesting to track the number of mobile request in a year — that and the percent of requests associated with Android phones!

Follow me on Twitter: SavioRodrigues.

P.S.: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”

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