Oz Weather Stats

Ever wondered which Australian city is most weather-obsessed? Probably not. But I’m going to tell you anyway. Its Canberra.

How do I know that? Well I don’t know it for certain, because my calculation is based on the assumption of uniform iPhone ownership across all Australian cities on a per-capita basis, and also uniform rates of access to Oz Weather in comparison with other weather resources on the iPhone. So alternatively, for example, it could mean that Canberra has the highest iPhone ownership, and perhaps its residents are not actually so weather-obsessed after all. But in reality I doubt that ownership rates vary that much – unless someone can tell me otherwise?

The following list shows the ratio of unique visits to Oz Weather per head of population, indexed on Canberra’s data, for the last month.

Canberra – 100%
Hobart – 75%
Melbourne – 68%
Darwin – 59%
Adelaide – 41%
Perth – 30%
Sydney – 29%
Brisbane – 25%

So this seems to be suggesting that people are more concerned about the weather in the most south-eastern capitals of Australia. And that does make some sense, given that the weather has the greatest natural variability in this region too. But we’ll have to see whether this pattern maintains itself as time goes on.

Finally – for those more interested in commerce than weather – you might like to know how the Oz Weather AdMob advertising has been progressing. I mentioned earlier that the ad fill rate had been patchy. Well it has continued to see-saw a lot. Some days see 100% fulfillment, others 0% – and its very hard to see any clear pattern to it. I would suspect they are struggling to optimize their ad placement algorithms. However, despite this, during the latest month fulfillment has never-the-less averaged 79.8%. On a more disappointing note, although the eCPM started out at a very impressive US$7, it has gradually sunk and the average since inception is now about US$1.20. So I guess I won’t be retiring next week, after all. But I have been making good progress with a significantly enhanced version of Oz Weather as a native iPhone application, and it may just be good enough to actually put a modest price on it in the app store. More about that later…