It may not be, though. We have good reason to believe that most IE6 users are using IE6 because it is the browser installed by IT on locked-down work computers. It doesn't seem unreasonable (to me) that a significant portion, though probably not a majority, of users of other versions of IE are similarly in work environments.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
Not that I have evidence to back this up; however, the kind of analysis that gets done on market share in computing doesn't seem to be able to accurately reflect how much something is actually used.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
I still don't believe this. I don't think that IE users are equal to or less than 10% of web traffic in the US or the world. That would be pretty huge if it was the case. Even a drop below 25% worldwide would be pretty huge news.
Quickly flicking through my analytics reports, I'm seeing IE percentages ranging from 84% (on an investment management site) down to 11% (a designer furniture site).
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a youth oriented and/or computer gaming oriented site even further skewed away from IE than my furthest outlier.
Not to imply you don't realize this, but the proportion of web users who use IE is a different statistic from the proportion of web traffic from IE. It's very possible that the proportion of web traffic coming from IE is significantly lower than the proportion of web users that use IE, and in fact, I'd guess it's fairly likely to be the case since heavy web users are probably more likely to use Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. than an average web user.
Now, I too would be very surprised if that observation brings 45% of web users down to under 10% of web traffic, but I don't doubt that web traffic from IE is lower than 45%.
I don't see anything on their site about where the statistics come from (though I barely looked) but Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers ) cites the 45% statistic from StatCounter as "usage share" and defines "usage share" as "the proportion of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser."
Can't say with any amount of confidence that Wikipedia is defining it correctly and/or using the statistics correctly, but there that is...
"StatCounter is a web analytics service. As of 1 June 2010, our tracking code is installed on more than 3 million sites globally. (These sites cover various activities and geographic locations.) Every month, we record billions of hits to these sites. For each hit, we analyse the browser/operating system used and we establish if the hit is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every hit referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every hit referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data and this is how we get our Global Stats information.
We do not manipulate the data in any way. We do not collate it with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We simply publish the data as we record it.
In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 15 billion hits per month, by people from all over the world onto our 3 million+ member sites."
The only thing they talk about are hits, and they mention it extensively. Maybe they do some analysis to determine unique users, but if so they don't mention it, and that would seem to be a pretty big oversight. That's why I said as best I can tell they use page hits.
UPDATE: I went to the Wikipedia link you provided and it says this: "StatCounter (July 2008 to present)
Usage share of web browsers according to Stat Counter.
Statcounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using Statcounter totalling more than 15 billion hits per month.[22] No artificial weightings are used"
Speaking of...does wikipedia list their web traffic numbers? It seems like they would have a pretty good representation of the public knocking on their door.
Indeed. I asked the same question earlier to the sound of crickets. Hitwise has, in the past, presented Wikipedia hits from search engines, but the last was 2007, so its not really useful for comparison.
Comments
It may not be, though. We have good reason to believe that most IE6 users are using IE6 because it is the browser installed by IT on locked-down work computers. It doesn't seem unreasonable (to me) that a significant portion, though probably not a majority, of users of other versions of IE are similarly in work environments.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
Not that I have evidence to back this up; however, the kind of analysis that gets done on market share in computing doesn't seem to be able to accurately reflect how much something is actually used.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
I still don't believe this. I don't think that IE users are equal to or less than 10% of web traffic in the US or the world. That would be pretty huge if it was the case. Even a drop below 25% worldwide would be pretty huge news.
In aggregate, sure.
Quickly flicking through my analytics reports, I'm seeing IE percentages ranging from 84% (on an investment management site) down to 11% (a designer furniture site).
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a youth oriented and/or computer gaming oriented site even further skewed away from IE than my furthest outlier.
Not to imply you don't realize this, but the proportion of web users who use IE is a different statistic from the proportion of web traffic from IE. It's very possible that the proportion of web traffic coming from IE is significantly lower than the proportion of web users that use IE, and in fact, I'd guess it's fairly likely to be the case since heavy web users are probably more likely to use Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. than an average web user.
Now, I too would be very surprised if that observation brings 45% of web users down to under 10% of web traffic, but I don't doubt that web traffic from IE is lower than 45%.
As best I can tell StatCounter counts traffic (page hits). It still has IE at around 45% worldwide, and slightly higher in the US.
Of course this neglects things like bandwidth via Netflix and Youtube, but still a decent proxy.
http://gs.statcounter.com/
I don't see anything on their site about where the statistics come from (though I barely looked) but Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers ) cites the 45% statistic from StatCounter as "usage share" and defines "usage share" as "the proportion of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser."
Can't say with any amount of confidence that Wikipedia is defining it correctly and/or using the statistics correctly, but there that is...
This is what the site says:
"StatCounter is a web analytics service. As of 1 June 2010, our tracking code is installed on more than 3 million sites globally. (These sites cover various activities and geographic locations.) Every month, we record billions of hits to these sites. For each hit, we analyse the browser/operating system used and we establish if the hit is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every hit referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every hit referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data and this is how we get our Global Stats information.
We do not manipulate the data in any way. We do not collate it with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We simply publish the data as we record it.
In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 15 billion hits per month, by people from all over the world onto our 3 million+ member sites."
The only thing they talk about are hits, and they mention it extensively. Maybe they do some analysis to determine unique users, but if so they don't mention it, and that would seem to be a pretty big oversight. That's why I said as best I can tell they use page hits.
UPDATE: I went to the Wikipedia link you provided and it says this: "StatCounter (July 2008 to present) Usage share of web browsers according to Stat Counter. Statcounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using Statcounter totalling more than 15 billion hits per month.[22] No artificial weightings are used"
This seems consistent with what I said earlier.
Speaking of...does wikipedia list their web traffic numbers? It seems like they would have a pretty good representation of the public knocking on their door.
Indeed. I asked the same question earlier to the sound of crickets. Hitwise has, in the past, presented Wikipedia hits from search engines, but the last was 2007, so its not really useful for comparison.
I found it. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigi...
google.com = 146,718,000 refers bing.com = 5,592,000 refers