According to new research from the NPD Group, Apple’s iPhone (including the 4S, 4 and 3GS models) now account for 43% of the U.S. smartphone market, beating out LG and Samsung. This news comes on the heels of Apple’s latest earnings report boasted record breaking sales for the iPhone, moving over 37 million units, and boosting earnings per share to $13.87. This sales figure dwarfs last year’s Q1 iPhone sales of 16 million, which at the time represented the most iPhones ever sold in a quarter. Chitika Insights was interested in conducting a study to see which U.S. mobile carrier was seeing the largest share of the rapidly rising iPhone traffic as seen on our extensive ad network.
To quantify this study, Chitika Insights analyzed a sample of iPhone impressions, made up of hundreds of millions of impressions within the Chitika Ad network. We were able to discern which carrier each unique impression was coming from and used this data to construct a distribution of internet iPhone traffic by carrier. The tables below highlight the findings:
Although each iPhone in our sample is registered with a mobile carrier, we saw the largest source of traffic was actually coming from Wi-Fi networks outside of the carrier, most likely attributed to the rise in “mobile hotspots” and use of Wi-Fi on personal home and business networks, taking up 41.78% of the share. This may come as a relief for mobile carriers who are desperately looking for ways to offload excess data traffic in order to maintain the speed and integrity of their networks.
AT&T grabs the largest share of mobile carrier iPhone traffic with 39.43% of all iPhone impressions passing through the carrier’s network, followed by Verizon with 14.62% of share and Sprint with 4.18% of traffic running through their networks respectively.
To further analyze iPhone web traffic share among mobile carriers, Chitika Insights conducted an additional investigation to determine the share of iPhone web traffic relative to the particular carriers that offer the iPhone. Compared to Verizon and Sprint, AT&T still represents the majority of iPhone traffic seen on cellular networks, with 67.72% of traffic. Verizon is the 2nd largest carrier by iPhone web use with roughly 25% of iPhone traffic, and Sprint brings up the rear with 7.17% of iPhone web use in cellular networks.
We believe we will continue to see substantial growth in mobile web traffic for Apple as well as competing manufactures in the months and years to come. In fact, based on analytics from StatCounter, users accessing the web via mobile devices have almost doubled every year since 2009. With more users turning to mobile phones to access the internet, we are also likely to see more focus placed on mobile ad platforms in 2012 and beyond. We’ll continue to monitor these trends on our network and report back with the latest data we are seeing.
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