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IPhone impressions deliver 76pc price premium over Android smartphones

Advertisers are very interested in iPhone impressions and are willing to pay a premium to get them, according to a new report from MoPub, which reports that iPhone accounts for over 50 percent of the ad spend on MoPub's ad exchange.

The iPhone?s share of ad spend is more than two times that for Android smartphones. Demand from advertisers to reach iPhone users helped drive demand for mobile advertising, with the monthly ad spend share on iPhone growing 12.4 percent during the first quarter.

?The big news is that we are coming out of Q1 with even more momentum than we had in Q4,? said Paul Gelb, head of strategy at MoPub. ?And, that the mobile ad marketplace is in a position to sustain that growth as more advertisers are coming to the space in a meaningful way and adopting more impactful ad formats.?

Q1 gains
The company?s Mobile Advertising Marketplace Report Q1 2013 shows that the mobile advertising market is growing quickly so far this year, displaying greater momentum and demand at the end of the first quarter than at the end of Q4 2012.

The first quarter of the year traditionally sees a drop in mobile ad spend as advertisers try to assess the performance of stepped up efforts during the fourth quarter. While the first quarter of 2013 did experience an extended down cycle, a significant ad spend growth spurt at the end of the quarter led to a quarter-over-quarter increase.

The iPhone and iOS delivered a CPM premium on impressions with iOS having a 39.4 percent premium over Android and the iPhone a 76 percent premium over Android smartphones.

Rich media catches on
MRAID rich media ad units showed significant strength during the first quarter, an indication that advertisers are shifting to more engaging and interactive ad units.

The CPM premium for impressions that support MRAID rich media increased 9.2 percent while the share of ad spend increased 15.7 percent for a total of 79.1 percent.

?Eighty percent of the impressions were for MRAID rich media and that is a significant number that really shows how well that ad format has been integrated into exchange buying,? Mr. Gelb said.

?Just a year and a half to two years ago, rich media was seen almost exclusively as a custom direct buy and was not aligned at all with exchanges and buying across numerous properties.?

The report also underscores how Android tablets are failing to gain traction with advertisers, accounting for less than 1 percent of ad spend in the first quarter.

?It appears that there has not been as much activity in creating apps as well as an advertising focus on the Android tablets,? Mr. Gelb said.

Bigger is better
Other key findings include that advertisers are adopting larger ad sizes with the CPM for 480X320 impressions growing 161.8 percent and the share of ad spend up 214.7 percent. At the same time, CPM rates and ad share spend declined for smaller ad sizes.

Other key findings include that mobile media buyers are opportunistically shifting ad spends in real time to address user behavior during severe weather, holidays and live mass media events .

?What we are seeing in the early 2013 is that again the demand and momentum is much stronger than anyone had estimated or projected and given the option and the velocity of which people are increasingly investments at this date that the rest of 2013 is positioned to continue to grow at a much faster rate than was projected at the end of 2012,? Mr. Gelb said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York