• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, March 7, 2012

As Apple readies its next-generation iPad for the big reveal today, mobile marketing and ad tech company Velti says that the iPad has a solid lock on the tablet ad market with 87% of impressions in January 2012. iPad impressions seen across the MobClix exchange throughout 2011 -- which touches over 20,000 apps on multiple platforms -- were exponentially higher than the next challenger, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which was responsible for only 6% of impressions by January.

For all of last year, Velti finds that the iPad simply overwhelmed all flavors of Android competition. At the beginning of the year, iPad had 12x the impression volume of the next-closest competitor, and by January it had 15x the volume of any other tablet device.

Of course, Amazon’s tablet entry did not hit the market until the middle of the last quarter and was likely not even opened by many users until the gift-giving final weeks of the year. Measuring into early 2012, the ad network JumpTap recently found Kindle Fire traffic up 50% since late last year -- and now responsible for a third of all traffic it was seeing in January. While JumpTap’s metrics represented a view across one large mobile network, Velti says its exchange sees activity on more than 40 networks worldwide.

For the universe it measures, Velti says iPad clearly is the more lucrative platform for developers. The click-through rates on iPad ads were 33% higher than on the iPhone and 110% higher than on Android devices. The effective CPM (eCPM) was between 30% and 50% higher than on iPhone and Android as well.  

The Samsung Galaxy Tab was the leading Android tablet through much of 2011 in terms of ad impressions. But in the final months of the year Velti saw the Kindle Fire surpass the Tab quickly as the leading source of ad impressions to Android tablets. In January, Samsung’s device was responsible for only 5% of tablet ad impressions vs. 6% for the Fire. 

Android continued to have the largest share of impressions compared to iOS for much of the year, peaking in August and September. But the combined inventories of iOS smartphones, iPods and iPads rebounded at year’s end to about half of the ad inventory Velti was seeing across the networks. The share of ad impressions coming from iPad alone started 2011 at 3.7%, but ended at 7.6%.

The iPhone continues to produce the most long-term value for developers, however. Velti finds that across all app categories, iPhone renders higher lifetime value from each users than does Android. In games, for example, iPhone titles produce $4.68 per user per month, compared to $2.11 from Android.