Ad network numbers suggest Apple’s iPad had a massive Christmas

“This holiday season, Chitika Insights took a look to see just how celebratory Americans got,” Haze Jayachandran blogs for Chitika.

“Using data collected from hundreds of millions of impressions taken from our network, we looked at tablet traffic in the days both before and after Christmas to see how much of a boost the gift-giving season gave to various tablets devices,” Jayachandran writes.

“Continuing the Holiday Tablet Wars, we compared the iPad, Kindle Fire, BlackBerry PlayBook, and Samsung Galaxy Tab, keeping track of how these devices have been faring in the competitive tablet market,” Jayachandran writes.

Chitika Holiday Tablet Trafic 2011

“Though the iPad’s lead over the other tablets is strong, it was not the tablet with the most impressive spike in traffic after the wrapping paper had all come off Christmas morning,” Jayachandran writes. “The PlayBook’s 50% jump in traffic Christmas day might just be the thing to help with RIM’s recent struggles. The real victor in the season’s tablet wars, though, has to be the Kindle Fire and its 122% traffic spike from the 24th to the 25th.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Chitika Insights’ Haze is perfectly named. Now for some real insights:

First, let’s forget about what Chitika can (their ads) and can’t see (iOS apps running iAds, iOS apps or websites running Google ads or any other non-Chitika ads, etcetera). Let’s stick to basics (we’ll use round numbers to illustrate our point): If 1 million Kindle Fires were being seen by Chitika and they increase by 122% after Christmas, then that’s a total of 1.22 million new Kindle Fires that were unwrapped, turned on, and measured by Chitika before disappointed recipients scowled at their gift givers and then promptly returned them (see Chitika’s Kindle Fire measurements on December 26th and 27th) in order to get cash back or store credit to put towards the iPads they really wanted.

Following along the same line of logic, if 40 million iPads were being seen by Chitika before Christmas and iPad shows a 28% increase (or whatever percentage that graphic is trying to show) after Christmas, then 11.2 million new iPads were unwrapped.

Now, who’s the real victor again, Haze?

12 Comments

  1. Follow the link to the story, and read professional’s comments there. His estimate is 2 million Fires, 500K PlayBooks, and 12 million iPads. Not too far off from MDN’s estimates.

  2. Questionable data, misleading interpretation.

    So we’re given 5 days worth of normalized data and we’re supposed to make a judgement from it? Let’s spot the faults: 1-do we care about relative gains or absolute numbers? 2-“normal” is based on data from 2 pre-Christmas days (I.e. probably not typical) 3-has Chitika data been measured by any independent means?

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