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Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system accounted for 54 percent impression share, growing 48 percent month over month on both smartphones and tablets through August.
That’s the latest finding from mobile ad provider Millennial Media, which for the first time combined all connected devices, such as tablets and game players, with smartphones to calculate impression share.
Apple’s (NYSE:AAPL) iOS platform, which includes the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, was almost half that of Android’s share, with 28 percent of impressions.
However, there is more than meets the eye to this Android leadership.
That Millennial is now counting smartphone and tablet ad impression share for each platform together explains why Android’s share fell from 61 percent and why iOS climbed from 21 percent in July. Android’s tablet share is tiny, while Apple’s iPad is ruling the market.
iOS is much closer to Android in application ad spend, notching 41 percent compared to Android’s 49 percent share. Again, RIM was third with 8 percent of app ad spend. Most of the apps consumed include games such as the whole Angry Birds lineup, or music.
As for hardware share, Apple remains king with 23 percent smartphone device share. Perhaps not surprisingly, the top 3 Android OEMs trail Apple. HTC has 16 percent share on Millennial’s network, while Samsung and Motorola enjoy 14.5 percent and 11.3 percent device share, respectively.
Together, these vendors have 32 percent of the smartphone share on the mobile ad network. Android handsets also accounted for 15 of the top 20 mobile phones on Millennial for the third month in a row.
Millennial for the first time also counted multiple versions of handsets together; including Apple iPhone 4 with legacy versions, the Motorola Droid with Droid 2, and the HTC Desire with HTC Desire HD. No doubt more specific-minded readers would want to know the ad share breakdowns for each iteration.
Finally, Millennial said it counted 32 percent of August ad impression over WiFi, 59 percent of which came from smartphones.
Millennial’s monthly report isn’t as received with the same anticipation and excitement as, say, smartphone market share numbers from IDC, Gartner, Nielsen, comScore, NPD and others of their ilk. However, mobile ad counting is getting to be a big deal.
So big that Google said Sept. 21 that it will soon include the mobile optimization of a Website as a new factor of ads quality for AdWords campaigns that are driving mobile search traffic.
“As a result of this change, ads that have mobile optimized landing pages will perform better in AdWords — they will generally drive more mobile traffic at a lower cost,” Google said.
In other words, Google officially claimed it behooves Websites to make their Websites appropriately speedy, designed and tailored for access via smartphones and tablets. All the more reason why reports like Millennial’s monthly ad stats are salient.