Opera: iOS still king of mobile ads, iPhone alone has equal reach and more value than Android
It's been a year since browser-maker Opera extended its series of insightful Internet studies with the introduction of its first State of Mobile Advertising report, and the company today provided its data and conclusions for Q2 2013.
Context & Ripple Effects
Opera's Q2 2013 report is the second installment of its State of Mobile Advertising study, launched just a year earlier, and the finding is striking against the shipment data: iPhone's dominance of mobile Web usage dates back to at least 2009, and even now Kantar pegs Android at 51.7% of US smartphone sales versus Apple's 41.4% for the quarter ending April 2013 — yet the iPhone alone still matches Android's ad-network reach and out-earns it per user.
The story traveled unusually far for a quarterly vendor report, with pickups at CNET, TechCrunch, AppleInsider, 9to5Mac and iClarified — an audience skew that itself reflects how much the Apple developer ecosystem cares about monetization asymmetry. It also lands mid-pivot for Opera, which announced in February 2013 it would abandon its own Presto engine for WebKit.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and ad networks using Opera's Mediaplayer network get a data-backed case for pricing iOS impressions above Android ones on reach-equivalent campaigns.
- Android's volume advantage — Canalys had it powering a third of all handsets shipped in Q4 2012 — is shown not to translate into ad inventory parity.
Second-order effects
- Developers weighing dual-platform launches face a sharpened trade-off: Android offers more devices but weaker monetization, reinforcing iOS-first sequencing for ad-funded apps.
- Android's security profile compounds the gap for brands — researchers had already flagged that mobile malware targets Android almost exclusively, resembling desktop Windows, making iOS traffic safer premium inventory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile advertising consolidates around revenue-per-device rather than installed base as the pricing metric, structurally favoring Apple regardless of market-share trends.
- Reports like this become the industry's shared measurement layer: a browser-turned-ad-network publishing quarterly benchmarks shapes how platforms, developers and investors argue about platform value.
The trend: Mobile ad economics are decoupling from unit shipments, with iOS commanding premium per-user value while Android competes on reach alone.