In the latest indication that Amazon’s Kindle Fire is exploding in popularity, mobile ad network Millennial Media’s new “Mobile Mix” report shows that ad impressions served to the Kindle Fire have grown an average of 19 percent every single day since the device’s release in the middle of November. This number is based upon how many mobile advertisements Millennial serves to each type of mobile device. Now, 19 percent might not seem like a particularly large number, but Millennial puts it into context.
“We’re not just seeing millions of impressions,” says Millennial’s November report, “we’re seeing a monthly run rate of hundreds of millions of impressions.”
To put this in perspective, the growth of the Kindle Fire “has slightly outpaced that of the iPad when the iPad launched in early 2010,” says the report. Of course, when the iPad came out, few had ever even heard of a tablet PC, let alone gone out of their way to buy one. So this isn’t a particularly fair comparison. It does, however, put the Kindle Fire into the context of the tablet market as a whole — no other tablet can say it outpaced Apple’s iPad at anything — and serves as yet another point of evidence that a competitively priced tablet (the Kindle Fire costs just $200, $300 less than the cheapest iPad) can edge its way into territory so far dominated by Apple.
Millennial’s numbers are some of the first we’ve seen about the Kindle Fire that didn’t come directly from Amazon, which has a notoriously powerful PR machine pushing its agenda. The company has not yet released exact sales numbers, for instance, but said that the Kindle Fire was the “bestselling product” on Amazon, and the bestselling tablet at Target, on Black Friday. Amazon also recently boasted that it sells 1 million Kindles every day, but that vague and oddly round number includes all Kindle models, not just the Kindle Fire.
In other words, Amazon should be very happy about this Millennial report, to say the least.
The numbers from Millennial are backed by a recent report from market research firm IHS iSuppli Display Materials & Systems Service, which predicts that Amazon will sell 3.9 million Kindle Fire units during the last quarter of 2012, making it the second-most-popular tablet, after Apple’s iPad line. This number is more significant than the Millennial count, since Millennial’s numbers are only based on its own ad network, not the tablet market as a whole. Despite this positive outlook for the Kindle Fire, Amazon still has a long way to go to catch up to Apple, which is expected to sell 18.6 million iPad units during the fourth quarter.
Correction: Millennial has pointed out that the growth of impressions served to the Kindle Fire is 19 percent every day, not just 19 percent, as we previously stated.
