ad impressions are meaningless. eCPM in mobile ads has been on a precipitous decline. As an example, last year ad revenue made up ~15% of my total revenues and my eCPM was around $3 (with paid apps and in app purchasing making up the rest). This year? It's barely a rounding error (< 1%) and my eCPMs are ~ $.10. Other developers are reporting the same thing across the board. Granted this is for iOS and not android, but I can't imagine android being a whole lot better.

To make an analogy with the web, I think mobile ads are pretty much stuck in the Yahoo era. It only works because there are new suckers to replace the old ones. Almost all of the indie developers I know that have tried mobile advertising have said it doesn't give you a good ROI.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but to me it's clear that the future for app monetization is paid apps and in app purchases. If you are going to rely on # of ad impressions to choose your platform you are looking at the wrong metric.

It feels to me like the conversation around mobile platforms is anchored in the past. It seems analysts and pundits can't function properly in a world where markets are diverse, and so every day someone somewhere comes up with a metric which is then presented as one platforms domination another platform. Like this one.

And the market for consumers and investors suffers as a result. These are not the "Windows vs Mac" days. This is not a "Google vs Apple" contest, no matter how hard analysts and pundits wish they were.

I personally don't care about stats like this because they tell us nothing. They look like they do, because you can pretty much extrapolate to your hearts content to make information like this positive or negative, and only confirmation bias influences which way you lean.

I'd prefer it if Analysts and pundits talked more about forward progress in terms of hardware & software and real life product launches, which would make their ramblings useful to consumers and investors.

With the exception of a rare few, they're basically just white noise.

I hate articles like this. It's like saying "this just in, four cylinder Yamaha motors are selling much better than BMW 328i's"

Of course they are! Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi use Yamaha motors.

So Google is doing well charging for those ads and showing them to people who never buy a thing?

Maybe what's really going on is that iPhone users are more likely to buy full version, non-ad supported applications than Android users are?

Is it really surprising that an operating system used by many companies is used more than an operating system used by just one?

I'd like to see the OS share total including smartphones along with tablets and devices like the iPod Touch though...

I've seen this argument several times over, but it doesn't make it any more sound. If iOS was offered on, say, three types of smartphones simultaneously (instead of just the one new one at a time now), that wouldn't make its sales triple (not even close).

Having more options doesn't necessarily increase sales. In some cases it drives down sales, because of a confused consumer. If Apple all of a sudden offered three different flavors of the iPhone 5, yes sales would probably increase a bit because of options being present that previously didn't exist. But for the most part you'd see the existing singular iPhone's sales merely split to all three options. We saw this with the unveiling of the Verizon iPhone. Yes, sales spiked for a short period of time, but at the end of the day it didn't cause iPhone's average trend of sales to increase more than it was with it only on AT&T. The people that wanted a phone with iOS, got a phone with iOS, only now they didn't have to switch to AT&T to get it.

And I'm sure you would like to see OS total share across every type of electronics device under the sun, because iOS is in an entire sector of the market that Android is not: MP3 players. The results would obviously favor Apple.

>We saw this with the unveiling of the Verizon iPhone.

This isn't really a fair comparison since so many of the VZ iPhone target market may be locked into contracts. (even still, the iPhone is VZ best selling phone)

>If Apple all of a sudden offered three different flavors of the iPhone 5, yes sales would probably increase a bit because of options being present that previously didn't exist.

What happened to iPod marketshare when Apple released the iPod mini? (again not a perfect analogy, but related).

Me too. Right now everyone seems to be comparing "Android as an OS vs the iPhone". That doesn't really make sense. Either compare iPhone vs the individual phones, or compare iOS (on all devices) to Android (on all devices).

Except they're not. They're comparing smartphones running Android to smartphones running iOS.

> The best Android phones still don’t match the iPhone (and as I said on Friday my next phone will again be an iPhone), but with the scale advantages Android now enjoys I think it will only be a matter of time before their phones are the best

I don't understand what he means by scale advantage.

I think the implication is, that increased market share means that third party developers will pay more attention to the platform and develop more and better apps.

My take on this is that a lot of smartphone users don't really care that much about apps beyond the core features that come with their phones. These people are happy with Android phones because the Android email & web apps are as good as, if not better than, their iOS equivalents. If you look at Apple's app store sales its really games that are driving their volume and I think a lot of people just aren't that interested in mobile games.

So I won't be surprised if Android continues to develop market share but never becomes quite the same app ecosystem.

Neither do I. I think he's implying that if more people will buy android then android will get better because of it.

Which would make sense if Google got more income for every copy of Android sold. But they don't.

Sure they do - Google is the default search engine on most of those devices. Granted, not enforced, but still.

It's also the default search engine on Safari in iOS, so I'm not sure there's a point to be made here.

That can change whenever Apple feels like it. Not so with Android. With mobile exploding, Android is excellent insurance for the future.

Android handset manufacturers can change search provider whenever they feel like it. Aren't a few already sold preset to Bing?

yeah, like netbooks versus macbook air :-)

Is there such thing as a $999 netbook? If you're not competing in the same price range it's easy to be better.

Is it really that surprising that the ad impressions on a platform where the majority of the popular apps are free and ad-driven is outpacing the ad impressions on a platform where the majority of the popular apps are paid-for and thus don't feature adds?

Until there's some parity between the Android Market and the Apple App Store, such that developers can easily accept payments from every supported country, then reports like this are going to continue to be meaningless.

I have AdMob running on a mobile version of a website I run (a Crossword focused site FWIW) and the eCPM is horrible. Pennies. Yesterday on the same site the difference between AdMob and AdSense was an AdMob eCPM at about 10% the AdSense eCPM. I don't think this is necessarily Google's fault (I mean Apple isn't exactly killing it with iAd), but in general I get the idea there's a huge glut of inventory.

Interesting. I wonder if Android users see more ads per use-hour based on the Android eco system's revenue model than other mobile os's. ...I have no data to back up my proposition, just a thought.