News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

June 4, 2008

huh

April’s market share? Yeah, about that…

Posted Jun. 4, ’08, 12:12 PM PT by Dan Pourhadi
Category | Apple » Huh?

marketshareconfused1.jpgEveryone who snubs their nose at independently-collected market share firms got a satisfying serving of Vindication this week when this forehead-slapping revelation came out: Last month, online-statistics firm Net Applications reported that OS X and Apple’s Safari browser market share numbers dropped in April—not by much, but proportionally more than any month this past year (with the exception of Safari between May ‘07 and June ‘07).

Welp, turns out they may have been—wait for it—wrong.

First, some background on how Net Applications gather their data, as best as they can explain it:

We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly basis.

Basically, they gather what OS’s visit certain websites and base their numbers on that. Get it? Sorta? Okay, now here’s what went wrong:

What happened was a distributed collection of sites inadvertently caused the problem. We can’t identity the sites responsible, but the nature of the problem is that all the millions of new visitors we saw were part of a massive marketing campaign that only worked on Internet Explorer. Since the campaign only ran on Internet Explorer, it caused respective drops in Firefox, Safari and Opera share. Also, operating systems that do not have significant Internet Explorer share were impacted, especially the Mac.

No kidding. The new numbers still show a decline in share, but significantly less than their previous report—a .1% instead of .47% drop for OS X, and a .01% instead of .31% drop for Safari. And to make up for the booboo, they graciously reported a large bump of share for both of them in May: .45% for OS X (bringing it to 7.83%) and .44% increase (bringing it to 6.25%) for Safari.

From now on, I’m just going to gather all my market share statistics by the number of Mac laptops and PC laptops I see people using at Starbucks—in which case, OS X is up to about 50%. Seems a little flaky, sure; but it can’t be any less accurate than Net Application’s stats, so why not?


2 Comments

Donn Author Profile Page said:

Dan, that may be a pretty relevant metric--the "Starbucks Share." Which is to say, the share of people who can afford $4 cups of steamed milk on a regular basis. I think it's much more interesting to know what percentage of those folks are using a given operating system, compared to, say, bargain-basement folks who are less likely to purchase software or upgrade their computer regularly.

June 4, 2008 12:32 PM
leonardodamian Author Profile Page said:

What I love about Dan is that he's so impartial.

And you just have to love the guy for that.

June 5, 2008 7:42 AM

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