iPhone Users Wary of Ads
By Anna Johnson on September 24th, 2009Research by Chitika, a Massachusetts-based online advertising network, indicates that, based on a sample of 92 million impressions, iPhone and mobile phone users are approximately half as likely to click on an advertisement as non-mobile users.
Of the 92 million impressions tracked, around 1.3 million (1.5 percent) came from mobile browsing. While the click-through rate of ads viewed by ‘non-mobile’ Internet users was 0.83 percent, the click-through rate for mobile users was just 0.48 percent.
Of the five major smartphone operating systems – Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows CE, Palm OS, and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry – iPhone had the lowest click-through rate at just 0.30 percent. iPhone users, however, also accounted for the most mobile ad impressions – 66 percent of the total.
So are mobile users just less interested in online ads than PC users… or is that so many online ads are designed for desktop Internet browsers rather than mobile based browsers?
Chitika acknowledges that the ads displayed on mobile devices are the same as the ones displayed to non-mobile, and are not specifically tailored for the mobile phone environment.
On this basis it’s probably erroneous to assume that mobile users necessarily have a greater aversion to online ads than desktop users. Anyone targeting mobile users should, however, keep these findings in mind and design their ads specifically for iPhone and mobile users.
