Report: Seattle Is Kindle Fire Capital

Kindle-FireAmazon last month announced the Kindle Fire was its best-selling product and most “wished for” item during the holiday season. It's also helped the entire Kindle line sell more than 1 million units a week leading up to Christmas. As the Amazon tablet proliferates, it’s starting to show up on mobile ad networks.

Jumptap released data Thursday showing that as of November, the Kindle Fire was already generating more than 10% of impressions on its network coming from tablets. That put it a distant second to the iPad (76%), but ahead of the Android-based Galaxy Tab (8.8%) and HP TouchPad (4.7%).

Amazon’s hometown of Seattle ranks as the Kindle Fire capital, with one in every 124 city residents owning the device, based on Jumptap’s traffic spanning 95 million mobile users. Other cities with the highest proportion of Kindle Fires included San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta and Phoenix.

Said Jumptap CMO Paran Johar: “In 2012, tablets will lengthen the shadow they have begun to cast over the PC/laptop, as they already perform many of the same tasks.”

The Jumptap findings come on the heels of data from mobile ad network Millennial Media showing the Kindle Fire has slightly outpaced the iPad in terms of impressions generated at a similar point following its launch in early 2010. The company added Kindle Fire impressions had increased at an average daily rate of 19%, with a monthly run rate of hundreds of millions of impressions.

While it’s still too early to judge the Kindle Fire as an advertising vehicle, a growing number of publishers have been rolling out apps tailored to the Amazon tablet. Among the latest is USA Today, which Tuesday announced its own Kindle Fire app sponsored by Volkswagen at launch. That suggests confidence the $199 device will have a steadily expanding audience in future.

JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth last month estimated Amazon will sell 5 million Kindle Fires in the fourth quarter and 20 million in 2012.

Among other findings from Jumptap’s latest MobileSTAT report, show Android jumped to a market-leading 52.7% share of impressions in November, up from 44.7% in October. Google recently announced it’s activating 700,000 device a day as it strives to build up its advantage over Apple in mobile advertising. The company’s iOS platform had a 22.1% share followed by BlackBerry, at 20.9%, and Symbian, at 3.2%.

But iOS had the highest click-through rate, at .73%, compared to Android’s .64% and a smartphone average of .65%.

When it comes to ad-targeting, location-based ads were the most popular option, employed by nearly half (49%) of campaigns on the Jumptap network. Other methods included serving ads by device feature (17%), carrier (5%), and handset (3%). Most of the time, location is combined with other approaches to further focus ad spend, the company said.

The share of campaigns using click-to-Web features in ads increased to 89% in November from 76% the prior month as entertainment and brand advertisers tried to steer consumers to their mobile sites. As a result, campaigns with an emphasis on downloads shrank from 23% to 10% on the network.

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