Santa likes Android? iPad web traffic share drops 7.1% post Christmas — January 2, 2013

Looks like Santa likes green robots with colorful googly eyes.

Web advertising and analytics company Chitika said today that after Christmas, iPad’s share of web traffic dropped 7.14 percent. Apple tablet family had accounted for 86 percent of all tablet-driven web traffic in the first part of December, but dropped to 78.9 percent in the days immediately following Christmas as happy gift recipients started using their new devices.

And smartphones? Both Apple’s iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy S III showed nice upticks in usage, with both adding about a percentage of web traffic share.

“The change in smartphone market share doesn’t seem to be too surprising,” Chitika’s Gabe Donnini told me today. “But the data on tablets that we observed was very interesting … Android was the clear operating system of choice for consumers giving tablets in the holiday season.”

Kindle Fire benefited most from iPad’s drop in relative traffic share, increasing its share to 3.03 percent. Samsung’s Galaxy tablet picked up an additional 1.38 percent of web browsing share, and Google’s Nexus also added almost a percentage point.

In other words, Android-based tablets — whether from Google and its hardware partners or from Amazon — did very well over the holidays, with proportionally more devices sold than iPads. Interestingly, Microsoft’s Surface made an appearance as well, adding .17 percent of browser share. That’s negligible, of course, but based on a pre-Christmas share of only .4 percent, it almost double’s Microsoft’s share.

“Surface just launched about a month ago … and the people who buy it are mostly early adopters,” Donnini told me, adding that he expected that number to grow as Microsoft continues to spend a “record” amount of advertising dollars pushing its new tablet offering.