Thrilling, isn’t it? Perhaps this chart showing the mobile share of pageviews by continent from the folks at Quantcast may get your attention:

Mobile Web, 1% of worldwide Web traffic – BFD. Right?

Well, take a moment to consider that in spite of this relatively small piece of the proverbial global Web traffic pie, all the buzz, hype, and a significant amount of marketing dollars seem to be going towards users who create Web traffic via their mobile devices; I bet you’re reading this on your iPhone right now. Every week, brands, ad agencies and entrepreneurs come to us with business plans / proposals / RFPs and are looking to spend invest serious amounts of capital into what they believe is next “killer” app for their industry or vertical.

Guess which platform serves as the foundation for most of these interactions – here, I’ll give you a hint:

Thanks goes out to the mobile metric mavens at AdMob, latest winner of the Google lottery, for the graph above, which breaks down manufacturer share of mobile web traffic by region. Even though there is a lot of blue, it’s important to note that Android is doing a great job at penetrating the market, especially in North America where the Android OS grew throughout the year and ended Q4 2009 with 27% share of mobile web traffic by operating system.

Still scratching your head as to why so many people are spending so much time and money on these devices / device users and their relatively insignificant share of Web traffic? Well, here are my thoughts for your amusement:

• We are in the last hours of B.T. (before tablet) and, if the rumors are true, Apple’s new tablet device will run iPhone OS, which will give a major boost to mobile OS Web consumption as long as it’s not on AT&T
• Time and money are best spent where they will yield the greatest return – well, only if the way in which they are spent / invested is ethical, moral, and provides a real value-add to others – i.e. people with these devices are the “premium” users, spending the most money and thus providing the greatest return

I’m going to stop there given that the tablet is set to launch within the hour, thus rendering any further speculation on my part totally pointless.

Catch you on the flip side…

– RP

The mobile industry had a record breaking December in many respects; below you’ll see some sweet charts from a few of my favorite metric-makers.

First up, AdMob.

Though recently assimilated purchased by everyone’s favorite internet giant, it appears that the good people at AdMob are still hard at work. Side note, if I ever get bought out by Google, I will most likely spend my first post-buyout Christmas and New Year’s Eve here, not in the office doing whatever it was that brought Google to buy me out in the first place. Live a little, people! I digress – back to the charts…

The chart below tells us that data usage for iPod Touches increased 96% on December 26th over the average from the week prior, while iPhone data usage only increased 12% over the same period of time:

The next two charts show operation system version distribution for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch devices; iPod Touch users trail iPhone users in terms of running the most current version of iPhone OS… no surprises here:

Next, Google.

The Android Developers Blog has recently launch what they are calling the device dashboard, showing the relative distribution of Android platform versions based on devices running Android Market:

Last but not least, Flurry.

Feeling charted-out yet? Well hold on, there are only two more and they are worth it! The information below comes from my personal favorite of all the mobile infographers; Flurry stated that:

Out of the estimated 58 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices in the market at the time, Flurry estimated roughly 40% of those, or 24 million, were iPod Touch devices. It appears that an influx of new iPod Touch devices has flooded the market over Christmas, and that users of the handset, primarily pre-teen and teen audiences, are voracious downloaders.

Please note that the chart below artificially sets iPhone download volume at “1″ for the iPhone on Christmas day to allow relative comparisons:

This next chart goes out to my DROID-toting friend, Tim. Downloads from the App Store are still crushing the numbers posted by the Android Market; bringing up this point, however, will only incite a reminder from Tim that we still need to bring our photography app, Best Camera (iTunes link), to the Android platform.

I’ll bring this post to a close with three nuggets of goodness from entrepreneur Mark Signal:

Three takeaways on this one. One, the iPod Touch is such a game changer in that it allows Apple to segment the market between subsidized, carrier-oriented offerings and non-subsidized, direct to consumer ones, a strategy that they would be wise to repeat across bag-able (Tablet) and Home Theater (Apple TV) device segments.

Two, as a platform play, it amazes me how few grok the combined footprint of iPhone/iPod Touch and what it means to consumer and developer pull (not to mention Apple’s massive billing relationship). People get so caught up in the phone/non phone distinction that they treat the numbers as somehow a 1+1=<2 story. Dumb.

Three, the Android device % split is emblematic of the challenges that Google will face in trying to avoid their platform from fragmenting, a challenge that they have only accelerated by announcing their own branded phone, something that I blogged about in: Android, Inevitability and the Dawn of Mobile

There, that ought to be enough to get your brain thinking in “mobile” mode, and just in time for 2010 no less.

Happy New Year!

– RP

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