Today we released our AdMob May 2010 Mobile Metrics report which revisits some of the major themes we’ve seen in our network in the past two years.

The traffic in AdMob’s network has grown rapidly and globally, but there continue to be strong regional differences with devices used to access the mobile Internet. Smartphones have also grown rapidly, in May 2008 they generated 22 percent of ad requests and in May 2010 smartphones accounted for 46 percent of ad requests. In May 2008, the iPhone and iPod touch generated 1.3 percent of worldwide requests and the first Android-powered handset was still six months from launching. Two years later, the two platforms accounted for 42 percent of all ad requests worldwide, driven by strong application usage.

The reports also includes a refresh of much of the network data that we have shared in our feature sections over the last several months. Other highlights from the report include:

• 92 countries generated more than 10 million monthly requests, up from 27 in May 2008.
• Traffic from North America, Asia, Western Europe, Latin America and Oceania all increased by a factor of at least 6x from May 2008 to May 2010.
• Smartphones accounted for 46 percent of traffic, feature phones for 42 percent of traffic and Mobile Internet Devices for 12 percent of traffic in May 2010.
• Motorola feature phones were the top three devices in AdMob’s network in May 2008, but in May 2010 the only Motorola device in the top ten was the Droid.
• The Nokia N70 was the number one smartphone in AdMob’s network in May 2008. It dropped to number two in May 2009 and down to number four in May 2010, but continues to be the top smartphone from Nokia in AdMob’s network.
• The Top 5 iPad countries in AdMob’s network, based on the number of unique devices, were the United States (58 percent), Japan (5 percent), United Kingdom (4 percent), China (4 percent), and Canada (3 percent).
• A year ago, the HTC Dream (G1) was the only Android-powered device broadly available. In May 2010, the leading handset, the Motorola Droid, had only 21 percent of the Android users in the AdMob network demonstrating the broad range of Android-powered devices available.

We began issuing this monthly report more than two years ago with a goal of sharing data to help the mobile ecosystem make better business decisions. Since then, AdMob has changed, grown, and at the end of May 2010 we joined the mobile ads team at Google. Note that all of the data in this report comes from the AdMob network and largely pre-dates the close of our acquisition by Google.

We plan to continue sharing data that will help everyone in the industry, but will take a break from issuing the Mobile Metrics Report while we consider how to re-invent the report to make it more useful and relevant. We will do regular data centric posts to our Mobile Metrics Blog, so please continue to follow it for updates.

The AdMob Mobile Metrics Report aggregates data from the ad requests in our network of more than 23,000 mobile websites and iPhone, Android, webOS, and Flash Lite applications. See additional detail on the methodology of the report at http://metrics.admob.com/2009/10/placing-admob-metrics-in-context/.

The slides from this month’s report are available for download here.