Apple's iOS may still be the best platform for developers to make money, but Google's Android is quickly moving ahead in overall mobile traffic, according to a recent report from Opera Mediaworks. The company gathered the findings for its Q4 2014 research from monitoring traffic over its ad network.
- Android leads in phone traffic at nearly 36 percent, compared with 28.7 percent for iOS. However iOS still drives most of the ad traffic (and therefore revenue), at 56 percent, a six percent increase over the third quarter.
- Social networking sites and apps showed the most traffic at 34 percent worldwide.
- Music, video and media apps came in second in terms of mobile traffic at 17.7 percent, but lead in terms of revenue generation at just over 20 percent.
- Arts & Entertainment sites and apps captured 18.2 percent of revenue.
- From a global growth perspective, Brazil's mobile ad market has become the 7th largest market, with its consumers are predominantly on Android (47.6 percent vs. iOS 14.9 percent).
Mobile OS percent share of traffic, according to Opera Mediaworks.
"2013 was a tremendous year for mobile advertising. At agencies, mobile campaigns moved from the back burner to the front and rich media ads replaced boring banners. Many publishers found their smartphone and tablet traffic eclipse their desktop internet traffic, and some even made more money from mobile advertising when compared to desktop," Opera Mediaworks said. "With a 13 percent jump in the growth of new devices during Christmas just in the U.S., we expect even more growth in 2014. We anticipate the global media spend on mobile advertising will make up 20 percent of all digital advertising worldwide in 2014."
Probably the biggest thing that sticks out here is the relatively low score for mobile gaming apps, which normally dominate most categories in other research about mobile apps. That could be because in Opera's case, the data is based on traffic that doesn't just include mobile apps but mobile Web sites, so the way apps and sites are sliced and diced here is a little different.
For more:
- to see the complete Opera Mediaworks report, click here
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