Android, iOS pull even in smartphone ad traffic, but iOS still drives most ad ...

For the second quarter of 2013, there was no outright winner of the most mobile ad impressions on smartphones: Android smartphones and iPhones were locked in a virtual tie, according to Opera Mediaworks' report published Tuesday. But when it comes to impressions generated by all types of mobile devices and revenue from mobile ads, there is a clear winner: iOS.

As you can see in the chart below, Android phones and iPhones each accounted for about 30 percent of mobile ad impressions. But the iPad puts Apple over the top when it comes to overall mobile ad traffic, with 8 percent of that traffic versus Android tablets' less than 1 percent. (The iPod touch also pulled in about 4.83 percent of mobile ads, which itself was higher than all of BlackBerry's mobile ad hits.) That puts the iOS share of mobile ads 13 percent higher than Android.

Apple pulling back even with Android in phones means that Android lost a bit of ground since the end of last year. Between October and December, Android phones saw a higher share of ad impressions than iPhones for the first time ever.

Opera's data was gathered via 13,000 sites and apps where it tracks more than 60 billion impressions per month.

Samsung - no surprise - is the Android device maker attracting the most ads: its devices captured 17.4 percent of all mobile ad impressions last quarter, which was good enough for No. 2 among manufacturers behind Apple's nearly 44 percent share.

But even more important than the share of ads is the money being made off of these platforms, for third-party developers and the platform owners themselves. And in this category Apple's mobile offerings remain far ahead of the field: iOS accounts for 49 percent of mobile ad revenue, followed by Android with 28 percent, BlackBerry with 5.4 percent and Windows way back at just 0.3 percent.

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By Erica Ogg

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