Mobile ad company Admob has great year, sees spurt in iPhone browser traffic

AdMob, the mobile advertising company, is reporting a sharp spike in iPhone mobile browser impressions on its ads over Christmas, going from around 350,000 impressions the week before Christmas to around 550,000 impressions after, according to its internal data. (Larger screenshot, below.)

Many people were apparently given iPhones over Christmas, and started using them right away, even though the iPhone has relatively small market share.

Google and Yahoo are reporting significant incoming traffic to their sites from the iPhone’s browser, the NYTimes reported earlier today, and the overall growth of iPhone browser traffic has been far more than from other mobile browsers. Google has been responding to the iPhone’s popularity by building iPhone-specific versions of its web applications, including faster-loading pages and support for iGoogle (press release here).

The Y-axis is AdMob’s mobile ad impressions, with dates on the X-axis.

San Mateo, Calif.-based AdMob, which serves a variety of ad formats across mobile device, is itself having a great year (previous coverage here). Its total impressions were up 17.5 percent last December versus last November (2,023,094,821 vs. 1,722,213,245), and has shown strong growth over the course of last year. See graph below — and the PDF of the report here. The full set of AdMob’s reports, here.