Traffic Stats and Google Chrome

posted on 10/02/08 at 12:36:38 am by Joel Ross

Now that Google's new browser, Chrome, has been released for a month, I figured I'd take a look at my blog's statistics to see how it's affected overall browser stats. Even though it's only been a month, a few things jump out as interesting to me.

First, in the past month, over 7.5% of my traffic is now using Chrome. That's a pretty good number considering they are just getting into the browser business. If you could pick a market, and gain a 7.5% share in less than a month, you'd be crazy not to! But where is the market share coming from? Well, for me, Firefox is down 4% and IE is down over 5%! I find it surprising that a lot of the gain comes at the expense of IE. I guess IE users are looking for alternatives, but it's surprising that they haven't gone to Firefox.

So IE and Firefox dropped a total of 9%, but Chrome is only at 7.5%. Where did the rest go? Opera! My Opera traffic is up 50% - yeah, the percentage is still small, but that's a pretty big increase for a browser that's been around for a long time. I guess having a new browser show up helps people renew their interest in other browsers.

After doing the analysis against my blog, I decided to take a look at the stats for a more mainstream site - or rather a set of sites. I took a look at the Develomatic suite of sites: Tourneytopia, MyPlayoffs.com, Tourney Logic, and Pay It Square. My guess was that my traffic is a bit different, since it's a more technical audience. During the time when Chrome was released, we were running a US Open tennis tournament for The Tennis Channel on Tourneytopia, so the traffic was pretty good there, and definitely a different audience than my blog. What did I see? Well, Chrome visitors comprised less than 0.5% of traffic! Also, IE is still king (whereas Firefox is now my blog's number one browser) and Safari gets about double the amount of usage as on my blog.

So while Google Chrome seems to be taking hold in the geek world, it definitely has not caught fire in the mainstream world. I guess they're just behind the curve!

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Categories: General