Despite out selling Apple, Android devices still don’t generate as much ad revenue as iOS

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 23 Jan 2014

There’s a dirty word out there, fanboi, that describes people who have a religious devotion to a certain brand or platform. Android fanbois will gladly tell you that Google’s mobile operating system has an 80% global market share, therefore iOS is garbage. But looking at one metric alone is silly, and if you have enough common sense, then you understand that. Now that I put that out there, let’s talk about Opera’s ad network.

MediaWorks is the ad business that Opera launched roughly this time last year. They serve roughly 60 billion ads a month, so they’re no small fish. According to their data, iOS devices represented a little over 43% of all ad traffic. That compares to almost 38% for Android. Here’s where it gets weird. Apple devices represented 55.7% of ad revenues from Q4 2013. If you look at Android, it was less than 32%.

Moral of the story? iOS users are, unsurprisingly, where the money is. If you’re thinking about launching an ad campaign, target iPhone owners. If you’re thinking about writing an application, target iPhone owners. If you don’t want to sit around, waiting for money to fall from the trees, target iPhone users.

No one is saying Android users are somehow inferior, but from a pure monetary standpoint, it’s just really hard to make money off someone who prefers to use Google’s mobile operating system compared to someone who has enough cash to buy an iPhone 5s.