In November, Mobile ad network Millennial Media reported that Amazon’s new tablet devices Kindle Fire, was seeing ad impressions grow at an average daily rate of 19% since its launch to the public in the middle of the month. Millennial says it’s not just seeing millions of impressions and the device is on a monthly run rate of hundreds of millions of impressions. But that data was gathered from a few weeks of usage from consumers in November, and as Amazon reported yesterday, December’s holiday season brought record sales for the Kindle Fire, with over 4 million Kindle devices sold in December. The Kindle Fire was the most gifted and wished for product on Amazon this season.
Today, Millennial is releasing data from its ad network showing impressive growth numbers from the Kindle Fire over the holiday weekend. In November, impressions on the Kindle Fire grew an average rate of 19 percent every day. Over this past weekend, Millennial says that as consumers opened and used their new Kindle Fires, ad impressions increased even more. As millions of consumers unwrapped new Kindle Fires, Millennial saw an average daily growth rate of 113 percent.
On December 24, impressions grew 32 percent; and on Christmas day in particular, impressions on the Kindle Fire grew 261 percent. The day after Christmas saw a 46 percent jump in ad impressions.
Of course, the Kindle Fire wasn’t the only tablet that saw a spike from the holidays. From December 23 to 26, the iPad had a daily growth rate of 6 percent. The iPad remained the leading tablet overall on Millennial’s platform during this time period, although the massive gain from the Kindle Fire helped to significantly close the gap.
The Kindle Fire’s impression growth on the platform has slightly outpaced that of the iPad when the iPad launched in early 2010. Millennial says that though the Kindle Fire has been introduced into a more mature tablet market than the market which greeted the original iPad, Amazon’s entertainment-focused platform and the lower price point have helped drive this early use by consumers.
Now that the holiday gifting season if over, it should be interesting to see if consumer usage of the Kindle Fire continues to grow at such a rapid pace. For example, the release of a new version of the iPad could effect Kindle Fire growth in 2012.
