comScore: the iPad Owns 97 Percent of US Tablet Traffic

As part of its new “device essentials” data product release comScore put out some interesting comparative findings about web traffic patterns from a broad array of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. But among tablets we’re really only talking about the iPad.

According to comScore, the iPad represents “89 percent of tablet traffic across all markets.” In the US the figure is 97 percent. Apple has sold roughly 25 million iPads to date globally, while competitors have seen disappointing sales so far.

In Canada, the iPad drives 33.5 percent of all non-PC traffic, though comScore does not indicate the breakdown of PC vs. non-PC traffic on a global or country basis (except in Brazil where non-PC traffic is on average less than 1 percent of total traffic). In March Performics reported that just over 10 percent of all search impressions its clients were seeing were now coming from mobile devices.

Drilling into the newspaper category, comScore looked at how much traffic was coming from non-PC devices across a range of countries. The UK sees the highest percentage of non-PC traffic, with nearly 10 percent of traffic coming from mobile devices and tablets. In the US the figure is 6.7 percent.

While publisher server logs and analytics will reveal this same data on a per site basis this report will be interesting over time to chart the growth of mobile and non-PC devices as a percentage of overall web traffic. What’s not clear from the data is whether the figures include traffic generated by or through apps.

Historically comScore has not measured activity within apps and so my guess is that the above does not reflect the contribution of apps.