Mobile Advertising's Battle of the Sexes

Leslie Horn writes in PC Magazine Men aren't from Mars, and women don't hail from Venus. But it appears men prefer Android and women tend toward BlackBerry, according to a new infographic from Inneractive that analyzes the differences in mobile advertising among males and females.

Inneractive reports that men tend to click on ads more frequently than women. Men have a click through rate (CTR) of 2.73 percent versus a CTR rate of 1.65 percent for women.

The company also takes a look at the top app categories used by either sex. The top three apps for women are entertainment, social, instant messaging apps, and brain and puzzle apps.

For men, the top three are sports, arcade, and action, and card and casino apps, Inneractive's infographic shows.

"It is understandable that men and women prefer different types of apps," the graphic reads. "What is even more interesting is the different return that developers generate based on the app category."

For example, women are almost six times more likely to click on ads within entertainment apps than in social and IM apps. This means the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions, or how much it costs to show an ad 1,00 times in an app) is higher for entertainment apps.

Men, however, click through ads at the same rate in the top two app categories for their gender, making the eCPM the same for these categories as well.

Inneractive also broke down the different operating systems each gender favors.
"When analyzing the gender of our users based on OS, we found that most platforms were split down the middle," Inneractive says. "Most, but not all. Android, we found, has a dominant male user-base and BlackBerry was just the opposite, mostly female."

Apple was found to be very close to an even split, with 49 percent female users and 51 percent male. Symbian reported the same stats.

Android, however, is 39 percent female and 61 percent male, and BlackBerry is 59 percent female and 41 percent male, Inneractive says.