Web traffic from iPad drops while Nook rises

Data shows traffic from iPad has dropped since May while the Nook has eclipsed the Kindle Fire

If I asked you who is in the lead in Web traffic among tablet manufacturers, who would you guess?  What if I told you it wasn’t Apple? 

I’d be totally making it up, that’s what.

Yes, Apple is still in the lead.  You can put the cyanide pill away.  But its Web traffic share has dropped ever so slightly.  Meanwhile, the Nook has eclipsed the Kindle Fire, says online ad network Chitika.  The company performed an analysis of hundreds of millions of ad impressions in its network from June 4 to June 10 and found that a whopping 91.07% of all Web traffic from tablets comes from the iPad, down slightly from 94.64% last month.

The runners up include the Samsung Galaxy with 1.7% of tablet Web traffic, Acer Iconia, Toshiba Thrive, and Asus Transformer Pad.  Interestingly, neither the Nook nor the Kindle Fire made it into the top five.  The Nook accounts for 0.85% of Web traffic while the Kindle Fire makes up a puny 0.71%.

Surprised?  Heck yes I am.  The finding is particularly surprising considering comScore’s recent report showing that the Kindle Fire accounts for more than 50% of the Android tablet market.  By comparison, its nearest competitor, the Samsung Galaxy, only accounts for 15.4% of the Android tablet market.  The Nook tablet doesn’t even make a blip on comScore’s radar.

And yet, Chitika’s findings reveal that more Web traffic (about one-tenth of a percent) is coming from the Nook tablet than the Kindle Fire, which the company attributes to the fact that Barnes & Noble launched a new advertising campaign for the Nook Simple Touch between its last May study and the current study.  Consequently, the Simple Touch with GlowLight (for bedtime reading!) sold out in weeks, and even though the Simple Touch is an e-reader and not a tablet with Web browsing capability, Chitika theorizes that brand awareness may have bolstered sales and usage of the Nook tablet.

So one conclusion we might draw from this is that people who buy the lower-priced Kindle Fire and Nook tablet are not as interested in them for their Web browsing capabilities, but for their media offerings, whereas people who buy iPads and Galaxy tablets are not as interested in reading and watching movies as they are in browsing the Web.