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, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, shows that Apple now dominates the mobile web in the U.S. with a 48% market share. This growth, interestingly enough, does not just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch also saw a meteoric rise in usage during the last month. Traffic from the iPod touch to AdMob’s network in the U.S. increased 3.4 times from November to December.
Overall, requests from the iPod touch increased from 18 million in July 2008 to 292 million in December. While traffic from the iPod touch grew at a steady clip over the last few month, a good part of this growth came, not unsurprisingly, in the week after Christmas. After the iPhone (10%), the iPod touch (4.7% ) is now the second most popular mobile device on sites that run AdMob’s advertising. Overall, iPhone requests grew 86% since November.
Just looking at the smartphone market, Apple also continues to solidify its dominance. In America, the iPhone now accounts for 48% of all traffic to Admob’s network, which is more than RIM (19%), Palm (9%), and Windows Mobile (15%) combined.
It’s All About Usability
As we pointed out last month, Apple has created a user-experience that makes its users want to use the mobile web on its devices. It is probably safe to assume that most iPod touch users could easily have used their desktops or laptops to access the web instead, but for quickly looking up the news or reading email, the instant-on experience of a phone is often preferable over the more fully featured desktop experience.
