July 11, 2006
The inaugural entry, I got thinking about showing a compilation of these statistics after all the recent reports trumpeting the growth of FireFox. Knowing the savvyness of our audience (blog readers), I thought it would be interesting to see the distribution of blog readers. Please note also that analysis will be applied to June 2006, the last complete month we have.
The first statistic that I wanted to take a gander at would be browser usage. For October 2005 FireFox had a 25% usage, as did it for June 2006. While it did ebb a bit (dropping as low as 23%), it seems to be relatively stable. Interesting is that IE6 seems to have lost 2%, Safari is stable at 4%, and that IE5 and Opera have been replaced as fringe browsers by IE7. NOTE: the browser #s are for each version. Opera 6, 7, 8, 9 are all tabulated separately, and thus why it does not appear on the list.
Search engine wise it seems like Google dominates by a mile. While in October AOL generated at least 1% of search engine traffic, last month it could not even muster that much. As AOL is powered by Google results, and Google's share (of 83%) remained stable, AOL's ability to generate traffic has definitely gone down. While MSN is stuck at 2%, Yahoo did gain a percentage point (at AOL's expense).
The country usage is hard to properly reflect on. While the US has gone down 5%, do note that this is a percentage decrease, not an absolute value decrease. SImply put, other countries are catching up (and moving ahead) in not only blog usage, but only internet usage.
One of the most interesting revelation was that browser resolution seems to be very stable. I can only postulate that as more 'newbies' (with their associated lower resolution) discover blogs, the percentage share of 800x600 resolution remains at 10-11%.
The last interesting discovery is that JS is being disabled by a larger number of users that previously thought. While 3% may look small, it is a significant chunk of traffic when scaled to larger numbers. It is in such cases that JS that properly degrades becomes more important (eg iBox used by iBegin Toronto).
For those curious, these stats are accrued for all the blogs that use MapStats. Only blogs currently in our blog directory can use MapStats, and since every blog listed must be manually approved, you can be sure that 100% of the traffic gathered is from blogs. We track over 20,000,000 unique visitors a month, thereby giving us a good sample to measure across.
Be sure to add your commentary.
