Statistics, Slashdot, and Digg
Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 9:06 amMy CD/DVD archival media article, that I wrote back in October hit the front page of Digg (on December 6th) and the front page of Slashdot (on December 11th). I also floated into the hot list of Del.icio.us during this time as well. Dreamhost survived this without a slowdown at all.
My average hits per month (for the 6 months preceding December, at least) are on the order of around 250 thousand hits, including those from my RSS feed. Being Dugg and Slashdotted almost simultaneously have skewed my stats to no end, however a few interesting things show up (besides of which I’m now at 586 thousand hits).
These three images are from the Analog statistics analyzer. from December 17th’s run, including 16 full days of statistics. They include more than just the article, the article being half of my total traffic for the month. These statistics are slightly rounded.
As you can see, Slashdot provided over 53% of my incoming traffic, Digg at 15%, StumbleUpon at 5%, Google US at 4%, Daring Fireball at 3%, and Del.icio.us at 2.5%. 831 other sites provided the other 17.5%.
Firefox dominates Internet Explorer in the statistics at 48.5% vs 30%, followed by Safari at 8%, and Opera at 4%. All other traffic outside of these three is less than 9.5%. Another interesting thing (though not reflected in the graph) is that people are not adopting IE7 at all: IE6 is over 80% of the IE hits, with IE7 being only 18% (the last 2% being IE4 and 5). Microsoft seems to have screwed up somewhere, people like IE6 better.
Windows is 69.5% of my traffic, which rather sucks. The graph’s Unix slice (being 97% Linux) is at 11.5%. The Macintosh crowd weighs in at 12%. Everyone else is the last 7%. Comparing the OS stats to the browser stats, it should be easy to estimate how much of my Windows users use Firefox:
- The Macintosh crowd is 12% of the traffic, yet only 8% of the traffic is from Safari, assuming that the other 4% is from Firefox, this brings Firefox’s total down to 44.5%.
- Assuming all of the Linux crowd uses Firefox (very few people use Konqueror or Opera), another 11.5% is subtracted from Firefox’s total, bringing it down to 33%.
- Assuming I did my math right (and assuming virtually all Opera users are on Windows), Windows’ total traffic % should be very close (but not exact) to
Firefox's 33% + IE's 30% + Opera's 4%. I’m 2.5% off, but that can be accounted for Windows users not using one of those three browsers or those using browser cloaking. - Adjusting those four Windows percentages (
/69.5*100), Firefox is 47.5% of the Windows market, IE is 43%, and Opera is almost 6%.
So, assuming I did my math right, Firefox is the major browser on Windows now; at least from my statistic’s point of view.
Update: For all 31 days of December, I got 806 thousand hits, a little over 56 thousand hits on the article itself. Total bandwidth used is over 6.42 gigabytes. My traffic seems to be returning to normal.
FYI- I am a linux user who uses Opera, and I’m sure there are others who do the same.
Je trompe FireFox pour aller à l’Opera…
Opera quand a lui, m’a surpris par sa rapidite, aussi bien au lancement du navigateur que lors du chargement des pages. En revanche, j’ai eu bien du mal a personnaliser mon interface, a tel point que j’ai abandonne tellement j’avais charcute dans l…
Just a tiny bit skewed; however, statistics before this month are even more skewed because on low traffic months* I was generating a good quarter of my own traffic due to maintenance, entry posting, gallery stuff, commenting back, and layout editing.
So, this is the first month that I actually have a large enough traffic spike that I can generate useful statistics from.
The only thing that skews my stats is I don’t have enough “stupid” users (ie, those who are completely clueless on how computers are actually supposed to be maintained, and are quite happy to use Outlook Express, IE, and download viruses)… Firefox usage is probably closer to 1/3rd on Windows for sites that have a large population of “stupid” users.
* Low traffic as in less than, say, 50k. Before around 6 months ago that was the norm.
Don’t you think it might be a little skewed since the bulk of your traffic was coming from Slashdot this month whose traffic I would bet is a bit stronger on the Firefox side. What did your percentages look like in November or how about a graph on a monthly basis for the whole year? I’m a Firefox users, but just curious from a statistics point of view.