A recent study shows that advertising directed towards mobile devices might not be the best method for companies to reach consumers, particularly advertisements aimed at iPhone users. According to the report, which drew its data from 92 million page impressions, mobile browsers make up 1.5 percent of all traffic, and less than one-half of one percent click through on an advertisement. Click-through rates (CTR) are always fairly low, of course, but it turns out users click through only half as often on a mobile device as on a traditional platform.
Based on Chitika's statistics, the iPhone OS makes up for 66 percent of the mobile market share, 10 times more than Android, and 33 times that of Palm and Windows CE. In theory, that's good news for companies targeting iPhone users, but the other side of that number is that only 0.3 percent of all iPhone users click through advertisements—by far the lowest of any of the mobile platforms. Incidentally, Windows CE and Palm users are among the mobile leaders in overall CTRs.
The report didn't specify, but it makes sense to assume that the iPhone CTR numbers probably extend to advertisements within applications, a common model for the authors of jailbroken applications as well as developers who offer free or lite versions of their apps in the App Store. If it does, we could potentially see a thinning of developers in the future, or fewer ad-supported applications.
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