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Firefox Site Visits Up 237%

Posted by samzenpus on from the still-growing dept.

prostoalex writes "Nielsen//NetRatings, a top Web reporting and metrics agency, started tracking the Firefox Web site in June 2004 and has announced 237% growth since then. Nielsen tracks Firefox Web site visits, not downloads or usage patterns, but it notes that "Men accounted for 71% or nearly 1.9 mln site visitors, compared to the women who comprised 29% or the minority population who visited in March 2005.""

3 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Calling Home by 2*2*53*4127 · · Score: 5, Informative

    And how does NetRatings know the gender of the visitors?

    i wondered that myself. probably an opt-in deal, like the neilson TV families who allow their viewing habits to be tracked and mapped against their demographic?

  2. Re:Nielsen? by ScentCone · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can visit the Nielsen-NetRatings site and bone up a bit, and if you want, grab a a PDF of their corporate brochure which mentions that their techniques include the usual image tag bugs, but also techniques just like they use when they do TV ratings: interviews with "recall" information, journals, and other (for us web folks) seemingly unlikely approaches. It's all about doing sanity checking against traditional (and easily polluted) web stats. Big companies like to have their facts audited and tested by alternate methods, and Nielsen's been doing it for a long time with other hard-to-measure stuff.

    --
    Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
  3. About the gender statistics... by Neopoleon · · Score: 5, Informative

    It looks like there's a lot of confusion about the gender data gathered, mostly along the lines of "How'd they do that?"

    I know it sounds crazy, but I went ahead and visited the the Nielsen site and read up on their strategy. I realize this goes against the techie tradition of never RTFM, but that's a risk I was willing to take.

    Turns out they use a "holistic" approach to their data gathering. Everything from "server side blabbity-blah blah blah" to conducting surveys, hiring people to browse, and tracking ad clicks.

    I'm guessing that the gender comes from the surveys, but I don't want to upset anybody who might be really excited about a new gender-aware version of HTTP.

    If you want to read up on this stuff yourself, you can check out some info here:

    http://www.nielsennetratings.com/mktg.jsp?sectio n= ps

    Click on a few products to see the range of apps/services offered. You'll see where all this data comes from.

    --
    - Rory [Microsoft Employee] | Free dirt: neopoleon.com