Surface, Kindle Fire are likely holiday winners, but iPad still rules the web surfing roost
It's a safe bet many people bought or received a new smartphone or tablet for the holidays. Which ones did they get? That's difficult to say for sure, but with some data from Chitika, we can get a pretty good idea.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third straight holiday season that ad-network web-traffic telemetry has sized the tablet market from actual usage rather than unit shipments — in December 2012 Chitika counted just 5 Kindle pageviews per 100 iPad pageviews, with the Galaxy at 3 and the Surface at 0.22. A 2011 purchase-intent study already showed 65% of buyers wanting an iPad against 22% for the Kindle Fire, so the question each year is whether gifting-season volume moves the needle.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and publishers buying through Chitika's network face a tablet audience overwhelmingly on iPads, making iPad-targeted placements the effective default regardless of which devices won the gift season.
- Microsoft and Amazon get a post-holiday talking point — 'likely winner' status for Surface and Kindle Fire — but the confirmed Chitika numbers show any new units are not yet converting into comparable web-surfing share.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's low pageview yield relative to its reported sales keeps pressure on the Kindle Fire model, where hardware margins are thin and the payoff depends on commerce and content consumption rather than browsing — reinforcing the case for ecosystem lock-in over general-purpose computing.
- Rival tablet makers competing for developer and publisher attention must price and position against a device whose usage share far exceeds rivals', since ad-supported apps and mobile sites will keep optimizing for iPad first.
Third-order effects
- If usage-based measurement keeps diverging from shipment-based claims, third-party networks like Chitika become the de facto scoreboard for the tablet market, shifting leverage toward whoever owns the traffic data.
- The pattern points to a durably bifurcated tablet market: one dominant premium device capturing most active use, and a long tail of cheaper consumption-oriented slates whose owners browse far less — a structure Forrester flagged back when no Android tablet had more than 5% share.
The trend: Tablet market standing is increasingly judged by measured web-usage share from ad networks like Chitika, where the iPad's lead has persisted across multiple holiday seasons even as rival devices claim sales wins.