Android U.S. ad requests pass iPhone on sites using AdMob – which we dumped for Quattro months ago

“Mobile advertising firm AdMob today released its March 2010 Mobile Metrics Report, offering a look at trends in the devices and operating systems accessing its extensive ad network,” Eric Slivka reports for MacRumors. “Among the interesting observations in this month’s report is evidence of continued growth and diversification of the Android platform. In fact, Android’s growth in the U.S. has sent the platform’s share of ad request in the U.S. past that of the iPhone by a 46%-39% margin.”

MacDailyNews Note: These are AdMob figures only. We dumped AdMob for Quattro Wireless when Google made a play for AdMob (still under review by the FTC) and Apple purchased Quattro. Therefore our numbers (both our mobile site and app, of course, are iPhone OS-only) combined with the numbers of any other sites that did the same, will naturally affect AdMob’s view of the market. AdMob can only see sites on their network, which is not the entire picture by a long shot. There are more than 50 million mobile web users and 20 million iPhone/iPod touch users per month across the Quattro Network.

To illustrate absurdity with absurdity: MacDailyNews today released its March 2010 Mobile Metrics Report, offering a look at trends in the devices and operating systems accessing its servers. According to the report, Apple’s iPhone OS devices have 100% mobile device market share.

MacDailyNews alone generated nearly 2 million mobile Quattro ad impressions in the month of March from iPhone OS devices that AdMob did not see and has not factored into their report. Those 2 million iPhone OS impressions used to be included in AdMob’s monthly reports. They no longer are. This skews AdMob’s view of market share to the point of irrelevancy. AdMob’s figures simply do not tell the story of the smartphone market as a whole. It’s like trying to use Alexa to gauge our site’s Web ranking (Alexa is a toolbar that runs only on the Firefox browser on Windows and Mac and on Internet Explorer on Windows. However, approximately 65% of our visitors use Safari. Therefore, in Alexa’s rankings, 65% of our visitors go uncounted.) As Apple’s iAd comes online (via Quattro), AdMob’s figures will become even more skewed and irrelevant.

Slivka continues, “On a worldwide basis, the iPhone continues to outpace Android with a 46% share of the ad request market, compared to only 25% for Android. It is also important to note that this specific metric includes only smart phones, and thus does not include ads served to the iPod touch. When looking at all devices capable of accessing AdMob’s ad network, the iPhone and iPod touch together grab 38% of the ad request market, more than double that of the nearest competitor on a manufacturing basis, Motorola.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Joe Architect” for the heads up.]