Pingdom pings StatCounter to make out 'Mac friendly' nations

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 17 March 2011 08:40

IT Industry - Market

Website uptime monitoring firm Pingdom has been looking at visitor stats to find out where Macs are most popular. Australia is one of the top ten nations on this measure.

Pingdom has analysed visitor statistics for February 2011 from web metrics specialist StatCounter with a view to finding out where Macs are most popular.

As iTWire has pointed out before, using the term 'market share' in connection with web metrics is misleading. Normally, market share refers to the way the total number of units sold in a particular period were distributed across the different vendors in that market, but it can also reflect revenues rather than units.

The data collected by StatCounter and similar operations gives rise to what might better be labelled 'web share' as it allows the breakdown of visitors to monitored sites according to various criteria such as browser or operating system used. And even where the service monitors a large number of sites (StatCounter covers more than three million), they do not necessarily form a representative sample of all sites.

So any analysis needs to be regarded as interesting rather than definitive, although changes over time can provide useful insights.

Anyway, Pingdom crunched StatCounter's numbers to come up with a list of the ten "most Mac-friendly countries" - that is, those with the highest proportion of Macs among the computers used to visit sites monitored by StatCounter. iTWire is one of those sites, by the way.

What did Pingdom find? Page 2 has the answer.