Related Articles
Apple’s iPhone saw the highest gains in post-holiday online traffic among the major smartphones, online ad network Chitika said on Thursday.
Measuring the online ad impressions generated on the major smartphones and tablets across North America, Chitika found that iPhone use grew by 1.8 percent from Christmas Day through December 29. In contrast, Google-branded smartphones eked out a gain of just 0.7 percent, while the rest of the pack — Motorola, HTC, LG, and Samsung — saw their respective shares of online traffic drop.
The iPhone also remains the top smartphone, according to Chitika’s stats, with a 54.3 percent share of smartphone Web traffic. Samsung is in second place with a 23.7 percent share.
But the picture was quite a bit different on the tablet side. Here, Apple fared the worst of all the tablet vendors measured, losing 1.3 percent of its share of online traffic after the holidays. Amazon was the winner with a 0.6 percent gain, followed by Microsoft with a 0.5 percent increase, and Samsung inching up by 0.3 percent.
The iPad’s decline could partially be the result of its higher price tag, according to Chitika.
Gift buyers looking to save money may have opted for less-costly tablets from Amazon, Samsung, Google, and even Microsoft. The 16GB Wi-Fi-only iPad Air costs $499, while the Surface 2 undercuts that to $449. But among 7-inch tablets, the new Retina iPad Mini starts at $399, while the smaller offerings from Amazon and other vendors start around $200.
The iPad still holds the highest share of online tablet traffic at 76.1 percent. Amazon is second with 9.4 percent, followed by Samsung with 5.9 percent.
Chitika’s data was based on a sampling of tens of millions of smartphone and tablet ad impressions in the US and Canada. Pre-Christmas information was collected from December 20 to 24, while post-Christmas stats were taken from December 25 to 29.
