by Gil Fewster

A Glimpse of 100,000 Internet Users

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A couple of weeks ago, I built a tiny 1-page website which accidentally* collected over 100,000 unique visitors in a little under 36 hours from launch. Aside from being extremely gratifying, this has given me a nice sized sample of web user data to pick over for interesting trends and figures.

Naturally this is skewed in all kinds of ways, so I’m not suggesting any of the following figures are representative of global averages. A tiny timeframe, highly specific subject matter, traffic driven almost exclusively via social media, very geocentric (85% from UK, Australia, US, Canada) and dozens of other factors make this set far too specific for true statistical relevance.

But, nonetheless, the numbers are interesting enough to share. It’s rare that I get access to a pool of visitors this large on something I’ve built without being bound by confidentiality, so I’d like to share some of the interesting bits with you. Make of them what you will.

1. Facebook Crushed Twitter
I’m not a big user of Facebook. I’ve got about 80 friends and my posts are mostly limited to automatic crossposting from Instagram. By contrast, my personal Twitter account is very active, with multiple tweets per day and around 1700 followers.

I publicised my site with posts to Twitter and Facebook, and the immediate results reflected my own presence on each network. The Twitter post went pretty well, with a few dozen retweets pushing it out wider circles. The Facebook post was liked and shared by maybe half a dozen of my friends.

But the visitor stats tell a different story:

  • 90,000 of the 100,000 sessions came via social referral.
  • 89% of these referrals were from Facebook.
  • 9% were from Twitter.

Yep. Despite that the fact that my follower/friends count gave Twitter a 20 to 1 head start, Facebook totally killed it once the referrals progressed beyond my initial influence and into the wider network through shares and retweets. The ability for Facebook to amplify reach, compared to all other social platforms, is nothing short of extraordinary.

2. Mobile First
Social media and mobile devices go together like Donald Trump and bad ideas. Given that the website was inspired by and directly connected to a trending conversation topic across social platforms, it won’t surprise anyone to learn that mobile devices delivered 66% of visitors, dwarfing the 30% of visitors on desktops and laptops.

Tablets are interesting here. At only 4%, they barely make a dent. But this may be due to the fact that most traffic was flowing in during business hours from each country of origin. Despite their near-ubiquity in the home, tablets are rarely seen in the office.

What’s the point? If you’re doing a social campaign and the destination isn’t optimised for a perfect mobile experience, you’re out of your mind.

3. Internet Explorer
IE 7+8 are dead. Stop building for them, and stop humouring people who ask you to. It’s a waste of your time and your client’s money.

  • Out of 100,000+ visitors, only 5 lonely souls were using IE7.
  • IE8 fared slightly better with a loyal band of 9 desperadoes holding on.
  • IE 9 and 10 scraped a few extra hits, with 5% and 8% respectively for a total of 156 visitors.
  • 86% of all visits on an IE browser were using the latest version, IE11.

It’s fair to argue that drawing conclusions about desktop browsers on a site with 70% mobile visits is not perfect. But that leaves a sample of 30,000 visitors on desktop devices — not a definitive sample size, perhaps, but certainly food for thought.

4. iOS v Android
Although Android has the edge on iOS when viewed globally, individual markets and regions vary substantially. Australia has long been known as an anomaly in its overwhelming preference for Apple’s phone over Google’s OS and, while the gap is narrowing, it still seems to be the case.

For this particular sample, dominated by UK, Australia and the US, it broke down like so:

  • iOS 43.52%
  • Android 26.02%
  • Windows Desktop 17.61%
  • Macintosh OSX 11.22%
  • Windows Phone 0.90%
  • Linux 0.54%

If you’re using a Windows phone, please give me a call. I’d love to meet you.

5. Desktop Resolutions
Screens are getting bigger, and ratios are getting wider. But the popularity of ultra-lightweight and compact laptops means a lot of screens have less height than you might expect.

  • 38.9% of visitors using a desktop or laptop computer had a screen height of just 800px or less.
  • Including screen resolutions with a height of 900px or less, we can account for 56.94% of desktop/laptop visitors.

On all but the most single-minded of screens, your content will extend below the “fold” for a significant number of users. Accept this fact, trust users to understand what scrollbars are for, and you’ll find life a whole lot easier.

But…
Yep, the skew is high, and this is a highly superficial analysis from somebody not particularly skilled in statistics or data. Take everything here with a hefty grain of salt and please add comments if you have data from your own sites which supports or contradicts the numbers here.

In case you’re interested.
The website in question is Why Don’t We Have an International Men’s Day. It’s a smartass rebuttal to the social media manbabies who spent International Women’s Day trying to claim IWD is sexist because there is no equivalent International Men’s Day.

Apart from being totally tone deaf as to the nature of discrimination and equality, these insufferable buffoons were just flat out wrong. International Men’s Day is on November 19.