Mobile marketers interested in capitalizing on the advertising potential of the iPad won’t have to wait long for the long awaited Apple tablet to saturate the market. This past weekend may have already done the job. Piper Jaffray estimates that Apple sold between 600,000 and 700,000 iPads on Saturday alone. That figure, however, primarily accounts for iPads purchased via pre-order during the previous three weeks.
Content producers and advertisers will find their work reaching an immense initial audience on the iPad, with some industry analysts predicting that the iPad may surpass the one-million sales threshold before the end of April. If Apple’s tablet goes on to achieve that feat, it would leave the iPhone’s record in the dust. Seventy-four days passed before the iPhone had topped one million units sold.
With the immediate public response to the iPad proving exceedingly positive, it seems the heavily invested hopes of the advertising community will not have been in vain. The iPad has arrived and so has a large audience of iPad owners that mobile marketers can now reach in a plethora of new and exciting ways. According to the recent findings of analytics firm Flurry, nearly a quarter of all new mobile projects will be directly targeted at the iPad.
Since the overwhelming majority of developers were not made privy to the iPad prior to the device’s unveiling on Saturday, thousands of content developers are likely crafting new applications and other software that will eventually find a home on the iPad – not to mention a home for the vast advertising opportunities that will similarly accompany the anticipated explosion in both content and public interest.
