Following yesterday’s IBM data, Monetate released a new study showing similar data related to retail browsing but covering a period of dates from Q3 2011 to Q3 2012.
This data also shows an acceleration of mobile shopping, from 7.7% of online in Q3 2011 to 18.8% in Q3 2012.
It also shows tablets growing to take about half of mobile traffic in a very short time frame.
The data also shows the iPad taking the vast bulk of traffic among tablets (88.9% vs. 88.3% from IBM).
IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark reported US Black Friday sales and the news is reasonably good. Overall online sales grew by 17.4% while mobile grew to make up 24% of traffic.
The data goes further to show the split between device types. I illustrate this split with the following graphs:
Of the 24% of traffic made up by mobile devices, phones contributed 13% and tablets 11% (or 54% and 46% of mobile respectively). Of the phone traffic, iOS devices were about two thirds of traffic and Android one third. Of tablet traffic, iPad was 88%, Kindle and Nook were 5.5% Galaxy Tab was 1.8% and other tablets were 4.4%.
Overall, iOS was 77% generated mobile traffic and Android (excl. Kindle, Nook) was 23%.
That’s an interesting snapshot of the consumption of mobile devices, but is there a pattern here?
The iPhone is a severely constrained product. We’re used to thinking that it’s production constrained—and it is, but it’s also distribution constrained. It has a business model that is almost completely dependent on operator subsidy. Few end users pay the $650 average price that Apple obtains and that price point has held for a remarkably long time. This price point is largely invisible to the user.
In this regard it’s very different from all the other products Apple sells. Historically, the company has preferred having its customers to also be its users and maintained a direct relationship with them, strengthening that relationship through its own retail channel for the last decade. Pricing is used by Apple as a signal to clearly illustrate value to the user and pricing is part of the communication about the product that Apple makes very explicit. This has been true for the iPod and Mac and is still true of the iPad. But this is not so for the iPhone. The entire marketing strategy for the iPhone (and hence the entire product concept itself) is “off message”.
Why is this?
Samsung’s recent success in mobile phones has been spectacular. It overtook Nokia for the top spot in overall unit sales. 
It went from having almost no smartphone sales to selling over 50 million units per quarter in a matter of two years.
Tim Cook speaking about the Apple TV product:
For Q4 we sold 1.3 million. That is up over a 100% year-on-year. We sold more than 5 million Apple TVs during the fiscal year, which is almost double the previous year, when we sold 2.8 million. So the business continues to do very well, but if you look at the size of revenue of this business versus our other businesses, it’s quite small and so it still has the hobby label, however it’s a beloved hobby and we continue to focus on it and continue to believe there is something more there and continue to pull the string to see where it takes us.
Five million Apple TVs per year is a half-billion dollar hobby. As such it quintupled from the first year (calendar 2007).
