I’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.