Sequoia branches too far
A storied financier of startups expands — but its new businesses have yet to take root.
A year ago, when venture capital firm Sequoia Capital ordered its portfolio companies to slash costs in the face of a sick economy, even healthy businesses, such as LinkedIn and Zappos.com, complied.
As word of the edict spread, many non-Sequoia startups also trimmed their budgets — a testament to the venture firm's influence in Silicon Valley and beyond. In its 35 years in business Sequoia had nurtured the likes of Atari, Apple (AAPL), Cisco (CSCO), Yahoo (YHOO), and Google (GOOG). If it was bracing for the worst, the situation must be serious.
But just as Sequoia was commanding its upstarts to contract, the firm was plotting an ambitious expansion of its own. Throughout 2008 and into this year Sequoia tried entering entirely new businesses, hiring professional investors to build a hedge fund, as well as an asset-management group that would mimic the wealth-preservation approach popularized by major university endowments. More
Where in the world are those 18.6 million iPod touches?
Apple (AAPL), for reasons known only to itself, does not report the number of iPod touches it has sold.
But it lets you do the math, and on Tuesday COO Tim Cook casually mentioned, in response to a question about the App Store, that the total installed base of iPhones (26.4 million) plus iPod touches (X) is now 45 million.
So where are those 18.6 million iPod touches?
Nearly 12 million are in the United States, according to a report on the geographical distribution of Apple mobile devices issued Thursday morning by AdMob, the leading mobile ad platform. That makes sense, given that Americans buy the lion's share of all Apple handsets, and the company has been particularly aggressive about marketing the iPod touch to U.S. students in its back-to-school computer sales.
But if you look at AdMob's region-by-region breakdown, the iPod touch is surprisingly popular overseas.
iPhone share of U.S. smartphone traffic hits 69%
See the blue slice in the pie chart at right? It represents the iPhone's share of U.S. smartphone traffic on the network maintained by AdMob, one of the companies that run those little ads that appear on the screen of your mobile phone.
We've been watching that slice grow over the past few months. In February it covered 51% of the pie. By April it had grown to 59%. And by Thursday morning, when AdMob released the May edition of its U.S. smartphone pie, Apple's (AAPL) share had grown to 69% — a 10 point increase in one month.
Some caveats are in order. This is just one company's view of the mobile Web — albeit the view of world's largest supplier of mobile ads, serving 6.3 billion banner and text ads per month. And it's only a snapshot of the smartphones on the U.S. portion of the AdMob network — although 47.6% of AdMob's traffic comes from the U.S. and 37.3% of that comes from smartphones.
Still, what it suggests is that Apple's domination of the smartphone market — the only part of the cellphone market that has continued to grow in the face of the recession, according to Gartner Research — is accelerating.
How tough this makes it for the competition is even clearer when you look at AdMob's report on the total U.S. handset market — one that includes smartphones, so-called feature phones and devices that aren't phones at all, like the iPod touch. Apple's share of this market, viewed through AdMob requests, is 45.1%, having grown 10.4% between April and May. Most of the other players in the field — including Research in Motion (RIMM), Samsung, Motorola (MOT) and Palm (PALM) — are showing negative growth. We'll be watching next month to see if Palm's share grows once AdMob starts to get data from the Pre.
Below the fold: AdMob's worldwide data, in which Apple's share (31.4%) and share change (5.2%) are smaller, but the pattern is basically the same. You can see the full report here.
See also:
You iPhone. Me iPod touch.
What — besides a two-year, $2,000-plus commitment to AT&T (T) — makes a person who carries an iPhone different from one who's got an iPod touch?
From January to May, comScore tapped into AdMob's U.S. advertising network to conduct a survey of owners of both Apple (AAPL) mobile devices and drew some interesting conclusions, which it released Tuesday morning.
First, the comScore/AdMob survey, like last week's Forrester report, identified several ways both groups differ from the general population. For example,
- 70% are men
- Half use the mobile Web more than they read newspapers or magazines
- More than 40% use their mobile devices more often than their computers to visit the Internet
- More than 40% spend more time on the mobile Web than they do listening to the radio
But when the researchers drilled into their data, they discovered that iPhone and iPod touch owners occupy very different demographics. For example …
- iPhone owners are older. 69% of iPod touch users are between ages 13-24, while 74% of iPhone users are older than 25
- iPod touch owners are less wealthy. 78% of iPhone users have a household income of $25,000 or more, compared with 66% of iPod touch users
- iPhone owners have more kids. 46% of iPhone users have children while only 28% of iPod touch users do
- iPod touch owners are more likely … to be in the market for cellphones, clothes, TVs and other electronics
- iPhone owners are more likely … to spend money on travel, financial services and a new home
Most of these findings flow directly from the first: iPhone owners are older and therefor have more money, more kids, more need of financial services, etc. (The one thing most don't need is another cellphone.)
And you might think that this age difference flows directly from all those free iPod touches Apple handed out last summer — and will hand out again this summer — to college students buying MacBooks.
But Jason Spero, AdMob's North American managing director, thinks it has more to do with 1) the cost of that two-year commitment to AT&T, and 2) the big advertising campaign Apple ran last December pushing the touch — and the explosion of games that run on it — as the "funnest iPod ever," a campaign clearly pitched to younger users.
Spero says the effect of Apple's marketing push leaped out of their December data: an explosive, almost vertical spike in AdMob's iPod touch Web requests between Dec. 24 and Dec. 25. "The iPod touch became THE gift for Christmas," he says.
ComScore describes itself as a leader in measuring the digital world, and AdMob is the world's largest purveyor of mobile Web ads. ComScore used invitation banners to solicit respondents from AdMob's network and ended up interviewing 3,454 iPhone users and 3,848 iPod touch owners.
See also:
Below the fold: snapshots of the two demographics as reflected in a few of the comScore/AdMob graphics.
The iPhone casts a giant shadow on the Web
Here's a pie chart that should warm Steve Jobs' heart.
That big blue slice covering 59% of the pie represents Apple's (AAPL) share of the U.S. smartphone traffic in April as measured by AdMob, the world's largest purveyor of ads on mobile apps and websites.
By the same measure, Apple also had the lion's share — 43% — of the mobile Web traffic worldwide.
The point of the "AdMob Mobile Metrics Report" for April 2009, released Wednesday morning, was not to give comfort to Apple's CEO. Rather it was to measure the large and growing shadow cast on the Internet by smartphones in general.
It cites a Gartner report that smartphones represented 12% of total mobile sales in 2008, and points out that those devices represented 35% of AdMob's traffic in April — nearly three times their market share.
But Apple's handheld devices — whose Internet shadow is more than five times their share — ended up dominating most of the report's charts. Among the highlights:
Of the 7.5 billion AdMob ads displayed on mobile devices in 160 countries around the world, 2 billion were displayed on iPhones or iPod touches- The iPhone OS has only 8% of global smartphone market share, but generates 43% of mobile Web requests and 65% of HTML usage
- In the United States, 20% of ad requests come from iPhones, 14.8% from iPod touches (globally, those numbers are 15.1% and 11%, respectively)
- Apple's share of U.S. ad requests grew 5.6% month over month
- The iPhone's share grew 3% in April; the iPod touch's grew 2.6
Those growth figures for Apple contrast with its competitors, most of whom lost share in the same period, including Motorola (MOT), Research in Motion (RIMM), LG, Kyocera (KYO) and Palm (PALM). The exceptions were Samsung, Nokia (NOK) and HTC, which grew marginally. See charts below the fold.
According to its website, AdMob stores and analyzes every ad request, impression and click from more than 7,000 mobile websites and 1,600 applications every day. Its most recent analysis of all that traffic, issued Wednesday, is available here.
See also:
- iPhone now represents 51% of U.S. smartphone traffic — report
- iPod touch use “exploded” Christmas day
Below the fold: AdMob's Web traffic numbers by manufacturer and model.
iPhone now represents 51% of U.S. smartphone traffic — report
This comes from one Web metric among many, so take it with a grain of salt.
But according to AdMob, one of the largest mobile Web ad networks, Apple's (AAPL) handsets now dominate mobile Web traffic in almost every category.
According to AdMob's analysis of the billions of ad requests it saw in January:
- The iPhone OS now represents 51% of U.S. smartphone traffic, leaving RIM's (RIMM) BlackBerry (19%) and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile (14%) in the dust.
- In the global handset market, the iPhone and iPod touch now represent 18.3% of worldwide ad traffic — second only to Nokia (NOK) with 30.1%
- Worldwide requests from Apple devices grew 28% month over month to 1.2 billion in January.
- The iPod touch is rapidly catching up to the iPhone; it now represents 40% of Apple requests, up from 20% in September.
AdMob stores and analyzes every ad request, impression and click from more than 6,000 publishers' sites in over 160 countries every day, according to its website. Its January analysis of all that traffic, issued Thursday, is available here.
