The new iPad Gobbles Up 5% of All iPad Traffic; CA, CT & NY new iPad “Hot Spots”
After much anticipation on Friday March 16th, 2012, The new iPad hit the market and proceeded to shatter first weekend sales records, moving 3 million units over the course of the weekend — the most successful launch for the iPad yet.
Context & Ripple Effects
Chitika's measurement arrives six days after the launch that Apple counted in its record 3-million-unit first weekend, and it converts a sales number into a usage number: within that window the new model alone is carrying 5% of all iPad web traffic. That matters because Chitika's network had already established the iPad as essentially the whole tablet category — 97% of tablet traffic as of October 2011, out-drawing even the iPhone.
First-order effects
- Publishers and ad buyers on Chitika's network face an immediate device-mix shift: one in twenty iPad impressions now comes from hardware that launched less than a week earlier.
Second-order effects
- Android tablet makers competing for a sliver of a market the iPad already dominates by ~97% of traffic must absorb another wave of replacement demand concentrated in wealthy early-adopter states like California, Connecticut and New York.
Third-order effects
- If each iPad refresh converts this quickly into traffic share, web-usage telemetry becomes a near-real-time read on hardware adoption — letting ad networks price and target around device generation, not just platform.
The trend: Tablet computing is consolidating into a single-vendor market where every Apple hardware cycle visibly resets the web-traffic baseline within days.