For every 100 web pageviews on an iPad, a Kindle gets 5, a Galaxy gets 3, and a Surface gets 0.22
Non-iPad web traffic is growing, but it's still a tiny fraction of what Apple's iconic tablet pulls in. — Advertising and analytics company Chitika released its December 2012 tablet market update …
Context & Ripple Effects
Chitika has been running this scoreboard all year: its May 2012 study put the iPad at 94.64% of tablet web traffic, and by September the measured share had climbed to 98%. A year earlier, Pingdom clocked the iPad at 88% of global tablet web traffic, so the pattern across three measurement houses is consistent — Apple owns browsing, not just shipments.
The December update adds two wrinkles: the first hard per-device ratio for Microsoft's newly shipped Surface (0.22 pageviews per 100 on the iPad), and confirmation that non-iPad traffic is growing off a tiny base. The story traveled unusually wide for a stats post — BuzzFeed, Mashable, Fortune and TUAW among eight pickups — because it quantifies the gap between tablet units sold and tablets actually used.
First-order effects
- Advertisers buying tablet inventory on Chitika-style data concentrate spend on iPad-targeted placements, leaving Amazon, Samsung and Microsoft with negligible measurable ad value per device in market.
- The Surface's 0.22 figure hands Apple a talking point at exactly the moment its shares are sliding under Android competition, per the same week's coverage.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and developers optimizing layouts and apps will keep designing iPad-first, reinforcing the usage gap that keeps rival tablets commercially marginal even where shipments grow.
- Samsung and Amazon face pressure to convert Galaxy and Kindle hardware into engagement — price cuts and content bundling become the levers, since organic browsing share isn't materializing.
Third-order effects
- If 'share of web traffic' displaces 'units shipped' as the industry's headline metric, quarterly measurement reports from firms like Chitika become contested ground where each platform's health is narrated.
- A durable two-tier tablet market could take shape: one dominant browsing platform monetized through advertising, and a long tail of cheaper devices competing on media consumption and commerce instead.
The trend: Tablet web-usage share is emerging as the real scoreboard of the post-iPad tablet wars, testing whether Android and Windows devices can turn holiday shipments into everyday browsing.