• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 3, 2013

The smartphone revolution may be six years old already but the market shifts and evolution of habits continue. In mobile marketing solutions provider Velti’s latest report on ad trends the company saw iOS increase its share of ad impressions by 5% in 2012 on the Velti platform. While Google Android’s impression share in May of 2012 was 41% compared to iOS at 59%, a year later that balance has become more lopsided in Apple’s favor, with Android only getting 36% of ads compared to 64% for iOS. The iPhone 5 alone gets 7.9% of mobile ads served by Velti compared to 2.3% by the Samsung SIII. Velti’s cumulative OS share numbers include for Apple its iPad (17.1% of ad share in May 2013) and iPod Touch (6.6%).

The data for Velti’s report is on ad exchange inventory to mobile apps from its Mobclix Exchange platform that served over 33,500 apps and over 45 demand side sources.

Among the year-over year patterns noted in the report, there has been a shift in content categories advertisers are favoring. Gaming apps have lost considerable overall share of mobile ads, down from 57.8% to 42.7%. Likewise social networking apps are now seeing 5.8% of ads compared to 10.3% a year ago.

These declines are not necessarily a sign of shifts in money away from certain categories so much as the growth in inventory among others. The entertainment vertical, for instance, is now serving 22.6% of ads, up from 15.6% a year ago. Book are up markedly, from  a mere .7% share to 7.3%. And photo apps now get 6.1% of Velti’s ads, up from 2.1%.    

Verizon’s embrace of the iPhone has led to a significant shift in ad share from AT&T. Verizon smartphones now see 34% of ads, up from 23%, while AT&T is down to 46% from 53%. Sprint’s place in the market continues to decline, now down to 19% of ads served to apps on the Velti platform.

There has also been an interesting shift in the days of the week when smartphone apps appear to be used. In 2012, app usage peaked early in the week, troughed on Thursday and Friday and climbed back up on the weekend. This year, the lull comes noticeably on Tuesday (only 12.8% of impressions) the day it peaked last year. Now usage still is quite high on Wednesday and Thursday, but remains strong on Thursday (15.1% of impressions vs. 12.3% last year) and into the weekend. The strength of reading, entertainment and gaming apps may explain the increased end-of-week use as people plan (perhaps practice) their weekends.

At least for its exchange, Velti says it is seeing a marked increase in CPM campaigns (now 40% and up from 10%) and a decline in CPC campaigns, from 50% to 10%. The company argues this is evidence of the popularity of RTB system and increased spend towards branding goals. There has also been a move away from the diminutive 320x50 banner ad and towards 300x250, interstitial and full screen ad units. Of course any vendor-specific metrics only reflect that seller’s changing client and publisher mix, so it is not a reliable measure of overall mobile activity and ad spend.