iPod touch use “exploded” Christmas day
Did Apple’s (AAPL) unrelenting advertising campaign for the iPod touch as a game machine (”The funnest iPod ever“) pay off this holiday season?
Indirect data from two Web-based sources suggest it did — big time.
Net Applications (a Web metrics firm), and AdMob (a mobile Web ad network) both produced graphs last week with sharp Christmas day spikes of the kind you usually see only from runaway hits.
“iPod Touch requests on AdMob’s network exploded on December 25th,” according to AdMob’s Mobile Metrics Report for December 2008. Ad requests from the devices — a rough measure of Web traffic — increased 3.4 times from November to December. Since July those requests have increased more than 16-fold, from 18 million to 292 million.
As a result, the iPod touch is now the No. 2 device on the AdMob network, with a 4.7% share. Combined, the iPhone and iPod touch now represent 15.5% of all worldwide requests.
The lion’s share of those ad requests come from the United States, but AdMob’s country-by-country breakdown suggest that the touch’s impact is considerably wider than that.
To read a summary of AdMob’s findings, or to download a pdf of the full report, click here.
Net Applications did not issue a separate report, but its day-by-day chart of page views shows a similar spike that settled down in the week after Christmas at a level roughly double what it was going into the holidays.
We won’t know exactly how many units Apple sold this holiday season until later this month, when the company releases the results of its first fiscal quarter for 2009. Last year Apple sold 3.5 million iPod touches in 2008 Q1, which closed at the end of December 2007.
According to AdMob, the company “serves Graphical Banner and Text Link ads on mobile web pages for more than 6,000 publishers. … Every day, we see ad requests from more than 160 countries.”
From Net Applications: “We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month.”
(Hmmm, 160 countries, 160 million visitors. … Perhaps 160 is to the Web what 40 is to the Bible, a nice round number that means “a lot.”)
Just wait until the next gen devices are out with a graphics chip and full Snow Leopard installed!
I just wish it had GPS.
I’m having a hard time figuring out Philip. When he first started this column, Apple could do no right. Now he seems to be objective. % )
From the same site, the iPhone growth is also impressive.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=iPhone
Ted, I think you hit the nail on the head. I am one of those who bought an iPod touch because I didn’t need anything more than my basic cell phone. No that I’m at the end of my Verizon contract, I’ll reconsider but I’d really like to see a non-exclusive carrier policy so we don’t have to pay so much for a data plan.
There is little question that the iPod Touch will be Apple’s big success story on the upcoming earnings call. iPhone sales will be lower than last quarter to the comparison the ‘just released product’ explosion and channel fill numbers, but the Touch will show amazing growth.
The Touch is clearly the upgrade path for millions of existing iPod owners and the gateway to introduce Apple gadgets to new families. To those analysts who thought, ‘who needs another iPod’, you clearly don’t understand the huge leap offered by the Touch. As an application platform, amazing mobile internet device, email and social networking device, and of course a great gaming platform, it’s not hard to see why everyone needs one.
Some may think this is cannabilizing iPhone sales but that must plain misses the mark. iPhones sales are merely falling from the introduction spike and will grow from the levels set this quarter. All these iPod Touch users include those who are happy with their current carrier or who don’t want the extra expense of a phone and data bill right now. But, think, the next time they want a new phone, esp. if iPhone eventually moves beyond AT&T, all these Touch users will want to drop a device from their pocket and get the latest iPhone. It’s a brilliant strategy and means a very bright future for Apple and their gadgets.
Any Chance of adding some scale information to that last chart Peter? We know zero is at the bottom but where does it go up to?
ex ped: The name is Philip. I can’t edit the chart, but the top number (on 12/25) is 21%. You can should be able to get to the spreadsheet by clicking on the chart.
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
I have a hard time believing this that “exploding” is not partly due to the FIX apple sent out to correct the touch’s lack of ability to connect to certain routers. When they released the firmware update, sometime in November I believe, that fixed the issue of connecting to the internet via the device for a good number of users. Still, however, many have issues connecting to GMail.