Building a mobile audience for media buyers in the UK
Original post : http://blog.adfonic.com/?p=237
As I’m writing this, Steve Jobs has just announced that henceforth the operating system formerly known as “iPhone OS” will be known by the much simpler and device agnostic name “iOS”.
Whatever you want to call it, Apple’s mobile devices have already left an impressive footprint in the United Kingdom, and this seemed like an appropriate time to share some insights into the UK audience reachable through Adfonic’s performance network.
Adfonic served ads in hundreds of apps available through the UK App Store in the month of May, and we’ve been crunching the numbers. While apps don’t account for all of our iPhone (and iPod Touch… and iPad) traffic, they are a significant chunk, so these stats can be taken as a conservative lower bound estimate of total audience size for these key devices.
In May 2010, Adfonic reached more than 800,000 unique iPhone users, and over 500,000 unique iPod Touch owners. We also have a rapidly growing audience of more than 100,000 Android device users.
To put this in perspective for advertisers, it’s useful to make a few educated guesses. First, let’s use what we know about iPhone and iPod Touch user demographics, an area that has been the focus of research lately. iPhone usage is concentrated in the 18-54 age range; we also know that iPod Touch skews younger than iPhone. iPhone users tend to be more affluent, working professionals — ABC1 in marketing parlance.
With this in mind, there are some interesting comparisons to be made with traditional media:
– Publishing: Nielsen estimates the “Young Professionals” demographic at 14,000,000 in the UK. If 45% of our UK Apple and Android users are aged 15 to 34 years old, this gives the Adfonic network a 4.4% penetration rate into this crucial segment. An audience size of 630,000 is roughly equivalent to the readership base of Heat magazine.
– Outdoor: The London Underground has one of the most sophisticated display advertising systems in the world. For a campaign that covers 100 advertising sites, you can expect to reach about 1.4M unique customers, the same as the UK population on Apple and Android apps reachable through Adfonic.
– TV: I wasn’t one of the fanatical followers that got up at 5 am to watch the Lost finale on Sky 1 last month, but I know plenty who did — and plenty more that recorded it to watch later. In total, about 1.12M people viewed this episode, according to the Guardian. In the UK, Adfonic app users outnumbered them by about 30%.
We’re also getting to know where our UK users are. There’s a misconception that iPhone users are concentrated in London, and while there’s certainly a major London audience, check out this click distribution map from a recent iPhone app campaign on our network:
As you can see, the iPhone is an urban device - London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh are the top cities, and the general pattern of usage closely mirrors the population centres of the UK.
When analysing this campaign we also saw that clicks skewed to evening and weekend usage over WiFi in urban areas — in other words, people at home, in a relaxed mood, using casual apps or browsing the web from their mobile phone.
So it’s an exciting time to start looking at the mobile advertising channel as more than just devices and technology; it is rapidly emerging as an audience in its own right, and it is the iOS devices leading the charge in the UK.
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