AdMob Mobile Metrics

May 2009 Mobile Metrics Report

In this month’s Mobile Metrics Report, we take a closer look at the iPhone apps in our network.  It is general knowledge that the top free apps are downloaded millions of times.  But with an incredibly crowded App Store, one important question is what happens to the rest of the apps.

The data below is a little bit different than the rest of the Metrics Report, as we look at the distribution of users of the iPhone apps in our network as opposed to the percentage of ad requests.  The data is based on the 15.1 million unique users of the iPhone and iPod touch and the 2,309 apps in our network in May 2009.

As expected the top several percentage of apps are the big winners, with hundreds of thousands of users in a given month.  But there are still a significant percentage of apps with a strong base of users outside the blockbusters.  As more and more iPhones and iPod touches are sold worldwide, usage of the medium and long tail of apps should increase.  In fact it is some of these niche apps that appeal to a limited set of users that makes the iPhone such a personal device.

As nearly every app in our network is free, we don’t have any specific insight on what the above curve looks like for paid apps.  And as always, remember that these results are only from our network and may not be representative of the iPhone universe as a whole.  Download the report in its entirety for more details.

Mike