AdMob's Mobile Metrics report for February focuses primarily on smartphones, a category of mobile phones that has seen tremendous growth in the last year. In February 2010, smartphones accounted for 48% of AdMob’s worldwide traffic, up from 35% in February 2009.
The really big news, however, is the stellar rise of iPhone OS and Android. In the past year, Symbian's share of requests fell from 43% to 18%, while iPhone's share of request rose from 33% to 50%. Android fared even better, rising from 2% of smartphone requests in the AdMob network in February 2009, to 24% in February 2010.
These numbers should not be mistaken for market share; according to Gartner, Symbian was still a very clear leader of the smartphone market at the end of 2009. It does, however, show how a large application ecosystem can make a difference.
AdMob's numbers are biased by heavy application usage, since AdMob serves ads into applications on the iPhone OS, Android and webOS platforms. But even within AdMob's network, Symbian was the top dog one year ago; now, iPhone towers above the rest, accounting for half of all smartphone requests in AdMob's network, and Android is approximately as big as Symbian, RIM and Windows Mobile put together.
See the full report here.