Individuals accessing Yahoo services on the iPad are heavy consumers of news, financial and sports content.

The Web search and content giant analyzed the growth and shifting demographic breakdown of iPad users on its services, which include Flickr, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports. While iPad usage volume has increased dramatically, the demographic breakdown still skews male, consistent with the traditional early adopter profile.

"It?s always interesting for us to see where our users spend time on our network ? especially on new devices like the iPad," said Zealous Wiley, director of corporate communications at Yahoo, Sunnyvale, CA. "Since we first conducted our iPad analysis in May, we?ve observed a seven-fold increase in the number of users visiting Yahoo services from the iPad during the first two months after the product launched."

"Also, while the user base continues to skew male, it is becoming more gender-balanced," he said. "The male to female ratio moved from 2:1 to 3:2."

Yahoo has been active in the mobile space lately, extending its line of mobile applications to the Android platform and building HTML5 into its iPhone-specific mobile Web sites (see story).

Analysis results
Yahoo performed a similar analysis in May, tracking the demographic breakdown of consumers using iPad?s to access Yahoo services one week after the launch of the Apple device.

This time around, Yahoo continued to track iPad users across several categories, and also began analyzing the demographics of iPad users in the nine international countries where the device launched on May 28.

According to the analysis, seven times as many iPad users are accessing Yahoo services than when the device first launched in May, though the demographic breakdown is still not consistent with Yahoo?s United States average.

Here is a chart that compares the gender distribution of iPad users on Yahoo services with Yahoo?s overall gender breakdown:

While the gender discrepancy has decreased by 10 percentage points since the iPad launch ? a 32 percent gap in May versus a 22 percent difference today ? iPad users still skew male compared to Yahoo?s overall gender breakdown, which is roughly 1:1.

In the U.S., the gender split is 64 to 36 percent, male to female, and that figures holds true internationally, with the exception of Japan where the iPad audience is 80 percent male.

The shift in gender breakdown has coincided with changes in the services iPad users are accessing via their iPads, according to Yahoo.

The company says that iPad traffic on Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Shopping and Yahoo Travel has increased by 28, 25 and 22 percent respectively ? a development that Yahoo attributes to the shifting user base.

Interest among iPad users in Yahoo business and investment topics has grown 46 percent since launch, 130 percent greater than average Yahoo users in the U.S.

IPad users are also nearly three times more likely to search for content related to investments, according to the analysis.

Yahoo has also been tracking the age distribution of iPad users on its services.

Here is a graph that shows the age breakdown of iPad users on Yahoo:

Users of iPads still skew older than Yahoo?s average.

28 percent of iPad users on Yahoo are age 35-44 (42% higher than Yahoo U.S. average for that demographic) while only 8 percent of these iPad users are younger than 20 years old (43% lower than Yahoo U.S. average).

Here is a graph that compares the U.S. and international age distributions of Yahoo iPad users:

Compared to U.S. early adopters of the iPad, international early adopters tended to be more enthusiastic about the technology.

Here is a graph illustrating that trend:

"We?re excited about the opportunities that tablets present for our users," Mr. Wiley said. "In particular, the iPad is acting as a catalyst that is bringing together the print and online worlds.

"While we are focused on growing audience in emerging markets and on emerging devices, we have strong demand from brands for iPad advertising and we will be launching iPad specific ad-units in Q4 of this year," he said.

Final Take:
Peter Finocchiaro, editorial assistant at Mobile Marketer, New York