Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

We released a bunch of data to share a view of our particular slice of the mobile web based on the requests we see coming through AdMob, and Dennis from WAPReview went ahead and added some additional data to some of our tables to take a view of the market by screensize. Fantastic, thanks for contributing Dennis!

There have been a bunch of questions about the data coming back in emails and in postings on discussion boards. Sometimes the quirks are things related to the fact that we’re measuring this across a publisher network which doesn’t map 1:1 against the normally carrier based (or survey based) metrics that commonly appear for us mobilists. And then there was the issue with us having called the United Kingdom “Great Britain” in the original report. Sorry, fixed that. Obviously, we don’t get out too much :-)

Some of the other numbers that have been called into question are a bit harder to pin down. Like the overall reported size of markets when compared to the numbers we see at AdMob. Are our numbers wrong or skewed by something we don’t have great visibility into? Or are the existing outside numbers skewed in some way? We released our numbers because the environment is very information poor at this point, it’s hard to find concrete sets of numbers pulled from hard data. We were hoping that feedback from outside would help us pin down places where maybe we’re doing things wrong. But also hoping that it would encourage others who have hard data to open up some of what they have so that the community can start to build a larger understanding of what exactly is happening on the mobile web.

It’s very much like the open source maxim that “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.” With enough interested folks watching the numbers and enough sources of information we should be able to get to a real shared understanding of just “how big the mobile web is” and how different areas compare. We’re planning to release numbers each month, tuning that report and refining the way we collect our data as we go. Being transparent with stuff like this means that sometimes you end up airing your mistakes for others to criticize. Thankfully the release has gone fantastic so far. I’m just hoping that when the time comes that we have something that we actually screwed up we don’t have to kill it off for fear of the negative PR.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under AdMob, Community, ThisIsMobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.