Amazon announced that “millions” of Kindle Fire tablets have been sold, though it didn’t specify precisely how many. A Morgan Keegan financial analyst guessed that about 4.5 million were moved this holiday season (vs. about 13 million iPads).
Previously mobile ad network Millennial Media said it was seeing huge volumes (“hundreds of millions”) of ad impressions from Kindle Fire tablets. Now, WiFi ad network JiWire has come out with some data that seem to (at least directionally) confirm the figures and estimates above.
Here are data from the US and UK on tablet share reflected on JiWire’s networks.
For some additional context, in August comScore said that the iPad “delivered 97.2 percent of all tablet traffic in the U.S.”
These numbers are reflective of actual tablet devices in use. Many research firms rely on numbers of “shipped” devices, which is not the same thing as devices sold to consumers. The RIM Playbook is a case-in-point.
Let’s assume that out of 40+ million iPads sold (before Q4), about 25 or 26 million of those are in the US. Using that as a baseline, we can do some very basic math on the JiWire US marketshare numbers to determine how many devices are actually in the market:
- iPad: 25 (ish) million
- Kindle Fire: 2.04 (ish) million
- Samsung Galaxy Tabs: 450K
- HP: 60K
- Asus: 30K
- Total market: 29-30 million
The figures in the market share breakdown above don’t add up to 100%; there are some missing tablets here and there. Regardless, these figures are immediately going to be wrong because millions of iPads not reflected in my estimates were sold during the holiday shopping period.
The post-Xmas tablet market in the US is probably going to be more like 40-45 million overall.
See also: Google’s Coming Tablet: A Response To Kindle Fire, Not The iPad and What Is Kindle Fire Good For?
January 5th, 2012 at 5:10 pm
[...] tablets have been sold/activated on a global basis. This would include Kindle Fire tablets, which probably number between 3.5 and 4 (or so) million sold to [...]