Opera is the top mobile browser - not!

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 04:26

Opinion and Analysis

Both StatCounter and Net Applications work in the same way. They provide visitor statistics to individual web site operators, then aggregate and slice'n'dice the results to generate various reports.

The statistics they present can be very different because they reflect visitors to different sets of sites. Neither company goes out to recruit a representative sample - their customers are self-selecting.

We can't even directly compare the scope of the two companies' data. StatCounter says its numbers are derived from four billion pageloads per month (out of the 10 billion it records), while Net Applications refers to 160 million visitors per month.

If each visitor was responsible for around 25 pageloads per month, the two reports would be derived from similarly-sized data sets.

That leaves factors such as geographical distribution and content topic to explain the difference.

And one last thing - StatCounter showed Android's share dropping from 2.1 percent to just under 1 percent during the month, while Net Applications talks of Android's "rapidly growing market share" with a latest share of over 8 percent.

Make of that what you will.