CB Stats for 2005 so far…

There’s considerable buzz going around — again — these days about browser use and server stats. Dave Shea recently posted an interesting article on this very topic, which prompted me to take a more-than-cursory look at my own web stats, and compare them to the last time I actually ran a detailed analysis. I came up with some interesting — and, I’m sure, unique — numbers:

The December 27th figure below was the actual analysis I ran on January 5, 2005, and the end date for the period was December 27th. I will refer to this as the first of the year (FOY) date, as the figures are close enough for government work.

From site inception in April 2004 to December 27, 2004, I had 109,000 total visits: beginning value was about 1,100 visits/month (V_mo); end value about 10,000 V_mo). In October 2005, this number increased to 205,000, or a V_mo of just over 20,000 V_mo. I’m now pinging about 1,100 people with my RSS feed — that I know of.

I guess this is healthy growth.

FOY Browser use for collisionbend.com:

about 65% Gecko users (Firefox, Safari, Netscape)
about 33% IE users (Windows and Mac)
about 2% other (Konqueror, etc.)

October 2005:

about 55% Gecko
about 43% IE
about 2% other

FOY Operating System:

about 70% Windows
about 28% Mac
about 2% other (Linux, BeOS, Unix; OS/2, Web TV and Amiga in there too)

October Operating System:

about 82% Windows
about 16% Mac
about 2% other (same as above, but including 1 regular Windows CE visitor!)

I expected, as readership grew, to see the increase in MSIE use; it was inevitable. What I didn’t expect to see was a mere 10% increase in IE use as readership doubled. At first blush, this didn’t make sense to me; the actual figure should have increased more like 25% — or even higher. Then I took a look at my referrer’s list (Top 16):

Now it begins to make a little sense:

Google is #1, but Eric Meyer is close on Google’s tail. I expected Yahoo! and MSN, but I figured that Brewed Fresh Daily would be higher. It probably was earlier in the year. Adam, Jeff, Bill and Jerry round out local favorites, interspersed with more Google, Technorati — and two others: Democratic Underground, which is a new site to me — never saw the site until I saw it in my stats, and I still can’t find their link to me on their site; and Very Big Design, independent web specialist Jen Funk Segrest, who is in Cincinnati, if I’m not mistaken. She linked to Disposable People in August of ‘04; I haven’t found a link to me on her site, although I did find one to Brewed Fresh Daily.

(IP analysis displays the vast majority of users as being in Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Washington State, Montana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachussetts and California. Is there a pattern here? Yup: I have relatives in all those states, as well as friends, former classmates and professional colleagues. Time analysis shows that my slow times are from 11:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. Eastern; busiest times are from 8:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m Eastern. Pattern here? Of that I am not sure, except more folks read my blog during the middle evening than during the day.)

As far as those referrers go, I haven’t looked at Democratic Underground enough to determine its validity, but I have seen Jen’s site: it’s very cool. Jen is a Mac Mentor, which I infer to mean that she works primarily on a Mac — and helps folks learn how to use Macs as well. Eric Meyer is my #1 person-as-referrer, and he’s on a Mac. George Nemeth is my #3 person-as-referrer, and he’s on a Mac, too. Further, many in my family use the Macintosh platform; in fact, I’m in the minority as a Windows user in my family — by a long shot! All three of my siblings, one cousin in Florida, and my bride’s brother and sister-in-law use PCs; most of the rest, numbering close to 20 cousins, use Macintosh.

This begs some questions: do Mac users tend to clump together as far as Internet use goes, or do they merely go to the sites they can access readily? Do they communicate with each other more — and therefore visit similar sites — because they have to, or because they can more easily? What this all goes to show, in my best estimation, is that your particular web site’s audience is a greater indication of how you should design your web site, and which browsers and/or operating systems to support.

My question is: how many Mac users permanently turn away from a site because the designer — intentionally or unintentionally — didn’t consciously support Mac users in the design process?

Personally, I can’t see turning away the traffic; there’s far too much at stake.

2 Comments

by Eric Meyer 20 Oct 2005 at 4:15 pm

Small point: Safari isn’t based on Gecko. It’s based on Konqueror, although it’s added so many fixes and enhancements that they’re not really the same any more. (Unless the Konqueror folks managed to get the changes merged back into their code base and I hadn’t heard.)

As for designers turning away Mac users, intentionally or otherwise, it’s hard to judge. A good example is the Gap’s site, as well as subsidiary Banana Republic—see Jeff Veen’s recent post about it, and the comments that followed. It is something I always try to stress to audiences when I’m talking about browser share on a site: make sure a given browser can use your site before you put faith in the numbers your stats package spits out. If you have 2% Mac users, it might be that Mac users don’t care about your content, or it could be that your site is broken in Mac browsers. Ditto for Opera, Konqueror, or any other browser.

I don’t think it’s a question of Mac users clumping in terms of online linking and movement, though. I didn’t know that most of those people used Macs. I could pull some sort of “well, the best people use Macs!” crapola, but that’d just be me being snarky. I do think it’s the case that one Mac user tends to breed more, as they wax poetic about their machines, or just do cool stuff that other people want to do, too. My father is on a Mac now because we wanted to do video chatting, and we couldn’t get iChat AV and AIM for Windows to do it (despite all the claims it was easy). He bought my old machine, I bought a new one, we plugged in our cameras and fired up iChat… and it just worked.

So there’s that.
by Will Kessel 20 Oct 2005 at 7:52 pm

You bring up a good point. I just have this nagging feeling that it’s possible that Mac reportage is understated on a lot of sites, just as IE use is over-reported, because of designers out there don’t code for anything else.

My main point stays intact (not that I was expecting it to be shot down, anyway) — as yours and Jeffrey’s and a lot of other web coders out there: code for the majority, and you lose a potential audience; code for all, and you’re far better off — and it’s not very hard, either. Far easier to update later on, too.

I’m also looking a little farther down the street, although I didn’t say it in my post: with Apple going to Intel chips, and given the rise in popularity of Apple today (the iPod has really boosted Apple, no doubt — and sales shares in the personal computer market for Apple are almost double now than a year ago), is it possible that Apple might see a rennaissance in market share over the next few years?

I really hope so; it’s far more stable and capable than anything Redmond has put out to date (this from a 17-year MS-DOS/Windows user!).