pie timeI’ve been looking at the traffic stats from this week’s Digg spike in our logs. Here are some observations about the 21,000 visits we’ve received so far:

BROWSERS

  • 64.42% use Firefox
  • 20.02% use IE
  • 9.82% Safari
  • 3.11% Opera

PLATFORMS

  • 75.92% Windows
  • 18.69% Mac
  • 5.06% Linux

SCREEN RESOLUTIONS

  • 30.83% 1280 x 1024
  • 27.15% 1024 x 800
  • Less than 1.5% use 800X600 or lower

About 40 to 45 % have Flash 9+ installed. Digg drove a little more than half of all traffic within the last 3 days with the following break down: Day 1 – 72% of traffic, Day 2 – 31% of traffic, Day 3 – 21% of traffic. So basically Digg is like a giant filter that feeds out to the rest of the web/blogosphere, since now we have a ton of referrers.

These stats are definitely from the web crowd and are SOOO different than the stats I see on “normal” non-tech-focused websites (you know, the ones outside our echo-chamber – the ones visited by the people who make up the rest of the 95% of the population.)

For instance, Firefox penetration usually runs around 15% for other sites I’ve monitored – generally between 6% and 25%. Also, 5% of Linux users is quite high compared to 0.10% to 0.5% that I usually see.

The lesson: know your specific audience, look at your stats and don’t generalize. Averages are dangerous.

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{ 2 trackbacks }

64% Use Firefox « f o x t r o t t
September 30, 2006 at 7:09 am
Logical Philosopher
October 1, 2006 at 1:48 am

{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }

Doug Curtis September 29, 2006 at 8:12 pm

I saw similar results in a recent posting, only ~33% of the traffic was IE, the rest were various versions of Firefox (and a small amount of Safari).

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Virtual Magic September 29, 2006 at 8:26 pm
Anon. E. Mouse September 29, 2006 at 8:29 pm

Curious…

You said that the Linux users typically ran at .1 to .5%

What about Mac users? Im guessing it was less than the 18% from the tech-savy Digg crowd – or am I mistaken?

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Mark September 29, 2006 at 9:06 pm

My site is the other way around and I get 60% IE and 20% Firefox. But they don’t use digg so figures :)

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EasyPCTips September 29, 2006 at 10:59 pm

We observed very similar stats in analysing the digg effect on a story we had on easypctips.com. A VERY high percentage of Firefox users, mostly on 1.5.0 and running on 1280×1024 resolution screens (17 inch TFTs must be very popular among the digg community!) The high number of Firefox users was particularly useless considering the article that got dugg was about Firefox for newbies!

Good post. Good luck with the diggs on this one too *wink*

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Adam September 30, 2006 at 3:01 am

I bet the only reason that IE is so high is that most companies have that on their computers! I am a diggger at work!

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Ivan Minic September 30, 2006 at 6:57 am

Opera deserves more :)

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Markus October 1, 2006 at 12:05 pm

@Anon: I typically see about 8% (+\- 3%) Mac users on non tech-savvy websites.

@Adam: Yes, I would imagine using IE at work do impact these numbers – just don’t know how much.

I personally like Opera the most, but too many websites break and I just don’t have the patience to click “View in IE or FF” buttons. It breaks up my surfing too much so I use FF. Plus FF has a bunch of extensions that make my life a lot easier.

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dBpr October 2, 2006 at 12:13 am

@ IE users at work: I’m in the same situation with you guys before, now I’ve Portable Firefox folder on my desktop :-)
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

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Paul October 2, 2006 at 10:20 am

IE still rule for my visitors. :(

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Allen October 7, 2006 at 5:05 pm

I took a look from the business side when we got dugg this week:
http://www.centernetworks.com/digg-business-standpoint

Very interesting from both the tech side and the business side.

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