AdMob Report Examines Apps Usage

Mobile ad network AdMob has released its Mobile Metrics Report for May 2009. The report examines the distribution of consumer usage of iPhone applications, noting that in less than one year, the Apple App Store has grown to more than 50,000 applications and given consumers access to applications with broad consumer appeal, as well as a long tail of niche applications that serve specific segments.
The report reveals that some of the top apps were accessed by more than 1 million users in May.  Few applications may reach this level of success, says AdMob, but there is also significant percentage of popular applications have built a strong base of tens of thousands of users. The long tail of applications that make up the majority of the App Store generated a minority of the total usage. 
“While the growth in the number of applications in the Apple App Store over the past year has been nothing short of dramatic, it has made it increasingly difficult for iPhone developers to drive consumer discoverability of their apps,” says Thomas Schulz, AdMob’s Vice President and Managing Director, EMEA. “AdMob offers developers the ability to monetise their application, and to create awareness of it with a targeted ad campaign.”  
Highlights from the report include:

• 5% of applications had more than 100,000 active users in May 2009, representing 116 applications in AdMob’s iPhone network.
• 14% of applications had between 10,000 - 100,000 active users, representing 322 applications.
• 54% of applications had less than 1,000 active users, representing 1,244 applications. 
• The average iPhone user in AdMob’s network accessed four applications in May.
• Five days after its launch, the iPhone 3.0 Operating System (OS) represented 44% of iPhone ad requests. In contrast, only 1% of iPod Touch requests came from devices running the iPhone 3.0 OS.
• AdMob reached 15.1 million unique users on iPhone and iPod touch devices on 2,309 applications in its network in May, the vast majority of which were free to download. 

You can access the full report here.