Yahoo has seen a seven times boost in visits from owners of Apple's iPad tablet computer. While the first wave of iPad users who accessed Yahoo content skewed mostly male, more women are accessing Yahoo from the tablet.
Yahoo said it has seen a seven times boost in visits from owners of Apple's
popular iPad tablet computer, which has sold more than 3 million units in less
than three months.
Yahoo
gauged the first wave of iPad users who accessed Yahoo
content in May and found they skewed mostly male and affluent. Now more women
are accessing Yahoo from the iPad, according to Yahoo's latest results
published
here July 8.
Yahoo Insights specialist Ashley Cheng said the male to female ratio went
from 2:1 to 3:2 over the last two months. Specifically, the first wave of iPad
users was 66 percent male to 34 percent female; the second wave was 61 percent
male to 39 percent female.
While more women are visiting Yahoo properties from the iPad, so are more
men. This is a reflection of the big boost of iPad adoption. When Yahoo first
published statistics about how iPad users accessed its properties, Apple had
sold 1 million iPads.
Two months later, the iPad has continued its feverish sales pace,
topping 3 million iPads sold in 80 days.
Barclays Capital analysts
believe Apple will sell 20 million iPads in 2011 despite
competitive threats from tablets based on Google's Android operating system,
HP's Palm WebOS and other platforms.
The first wave of Yahoo iPad adopters accessed Yahoo's sports and finance
within the first nine days after Apple launched the product. Almost half of
these users also owned and used Apple's iPhone, suggesting strong ties between
the iPhone and iPad user experience, which employ variations of the same
operating system.
Cheng also found that more people are visiting Yahoo's Groups, Shopping and
Travel, which increased 28 percent, 25 percent and 22 percent, respectively
over the first wave of iPad users. Early iPad users predominantly accessed
Yahoo's Flickr, Finance, News and Sports (and still do).
In addition, Cheng looked at iPad users visiting Yahoo from outside the United
States. iPad became available in nine
countries by May 28.
She claimed Yahoo iPad users hailing from countries outside of the United
States show similar demographics. The male
skew is roughly the same, except in Japan,
where male users outstrip female users 4 to 1.
One trend that has remained a model of consistency for iPad use is the age
demographic, Cheng said. The sweet age spot for iPad users is between ages 30
and 54, she said.
Meanwhile, results from Resolve Market Research
concluded
that iPads pose greater threats to e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle and
portable gaming devices, which would include Apple's own iPod Touch.
Some 49 percent of Resolve survey respondents said they would not purchase
an e-reader after owning and iPad. Some 38 percent of respondents said that
they did not plan to buy a portable gaming device after owning an iPad.
This sheds some light on the question of whether or not the iPad would
cannibalize some of the current consumer devices on the market.