Fri, 07/09/2010 – 07:37 by Yahoo
offers its second look at iPad users on the Yahoo network and Yahoo apps. There’s nothing dramatic that the company finds but there are some interesting observations about behavior and audience composition:
The user base continues to skew male, but is becoming more gender-balanced; the male to female ratio moved from 2:1 to 3:2: 
The sweet spot for [the iPad] user base continues to be in the 30–54 age range, and that about half of the Yahoo! iPad users have been using Yahoo! for at least six years (see charts below). 
Regarding international iPad usage, gender and age distribution are very similar to the US.
In general, the male skew is the same internationally as it is in the U.S., though it is stronger in Japan, where male users outnumber women 4:1. Similarly, the 35–44 age cohort is the largest among all international iPad users on Yahoo!. 
These data suggest, among other things, that there are more similarities than differences among early iPad buyers around the globe.
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The recently released
Pew mobile report featured some interesting data at the end on eReaders and tablets:
- 4% of Americans own eBook Readers and 46% use them to access the Internet, according to Pew’s survey
- 3% of respondents said they owned a tablet computer such as an iPad
These figures illustrate the difficulty and peril of self-reported data and extrapolating that to the larger population. For example, if 3% of US adults (out of a total of about 228 million) actually owned a “tablet computer” that would mean 6.8 million people in the US own them.
The iPad has globally sold
something more than 3 million units. Unless people didn’t understand what is/was meant by the term tablet computer the survey results overstate the market. There are effectively no other tablets on the market today, except for a couple of isolated Android tablet devices that really haven’t penetrated. Windows-based “tablet PCs” have largely failed and so can’t be assumed to be part of this response.
Does this inflated result cast some doubt on the larger survey findings? I think directionally they’re certainly accurate but may be imprecise, despite the claim of a survey margin of error “plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.”
