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July 20, 2005
Firefox's market share higher than expected?
I can make up juicy headlines too. Tom's Hardware has an article called: Automated scripts inflating IE's market share? Who's to say? Everyone has their own methodology.
I've been tracking browser stats since 1999 and have seen browser stats since 1995, stats that Netscape collected way back when.
The only real way to track browser market share is to get data from all sources and watch and track the data over time. You get the data from top sites directly from a summary report of their web server logs, and also third party reporting companies (Web Side Story, Omniture, Media Metrix, Xiti, etc). You ball park what the market share data is according to all data you gathered. I have Firefox pegged between 7 - 11% market share. We're the second most popular browser after IE 6 ~70%, and ahead of Safari and the AOL client at roughly 4% each.
Some people will give you market share based on page views, some per visitors, some with x or y stripped out, and others with x or y added. So everyone has their own methodology. I'm surprised web sites aren't more open about browser market share data, but it's actually really easy to get that information.
Want to know the secret? All you have to do is ask the right people. In one case, just about everyone advertises so all you really need to do is ask a salesperson from one of the top sites and they'll get that data for you in an instant.
In other words, I want my ads to be targeted to Firefox users, they're more active and are more likely to transact. What's the percentage of Firefox users on your site? Great, thanks for the info. Pretty easy.
Posted by rebron at July 20, 2005 10:08 PM
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