Adobe’s Digital Index analyzed more than 100 billion visits to over 1,000 websites and determined that tablet web traffic at 8% has surpassed smartphone’s 7%. Their combined 15% share is more than double the 7% at December 2011 and up 50% from about 10% in June 2012.
In some ways this isn’t too surprising in that a tablet is much more engaging than a smartphone when it comes to reading emails, searching the Internet, buying on-line or watching a video. As can be seen in the following chart tables have 70% higher page views per visit than smartphones.
The remaining 84% (due to rounding) web traffic is either from desktops or laptop computers. Tablets and smartphones should increase their share and given the flat sales of desktops and laptops and strong growth of tablets and smartphones their share could approach 50% in four to six years.
The following chart shows the percent of web traffic generated from tablets. The UK has the highest share of its web traffic generated by tablets while China has the least. Given the cost of a tablet to an average salary it is not surprising that China’s share is the lowest of these countries. All of these countries had a doubling of tablet web traffic in 2012.
The last chart shows the breakdown of tablet vs. smartphone web traffic by country. The US, Canada and the European countries had tablets generating more web traffic than smartphones but in Japan and China it was reversed.
Disclosure: My family and I own Apple shares
