Colleague Gabe Donnini discussed the various browser versions that regularly hit our network of websites from social media on Friday. Today, Chitika Insights continues this theme by investigating the various operating system versions that generate web browser traffic to our network.
Using a one week sample of North American traffic, similar to our browser distribution study, Chitika found some interesting distributions on each of the websites:
While facebook maintains the Windows share most reflective of web browser traffic (as it is used by over 750 million people in the world), our other websites have more interesting traffic.
Given the “stone age” reputation of Myspace, it is no surprise to see that a large percentage of our referrals from the site are from a Windows machine, but Twitter? One could theorize that its popularity among professionals in various fields makes it a popular “work” website, when traffic is most heavily biased towards Windows OS. Unsurprisingly, given what we know about their browser market share, Stumbleupon sees relatively little Windows traffic.
While the share of traffic originating from Windows is inversely related to the share of other operating systems, the various distributions highlight interesting user profiles:
Twitter sees almost no web browsing traffic from mobile, a clear deviation from Facebook, which sees almost 10% of its browsing originate from mobile operating systems. This can be readily explained by the simple fact that while people continue to use a more traditional browser for sites like Facebook, mobile operators lean almost exclusively to the mobile app for Twitter.
Also of note is the unofficial “champion of mobile browsing” in Digg. While Digg has obviously fallen behind Reddit, and Kevin Rose is off to his next start up, they still seem to be popular among mobile users; almost 12.7% of their traffic on the Chitika network originated from an iOS or Android device, vs. just 4.8% for Reddit.
Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, Stumbleupon is the “Mac king” of our group of social media sites, with over 30% of its web browser traffic originating from a Mac OS X device. Among mobile users, Android owners seem more biased towards browser usage, while iOS usage leans towards usage of the Stumbleupon app. Google+ also sees a lot of Mac, and not a lot of mobile, browsing; this however may have more grave implications for the site that was supposed to surpass Facebook.
Understanding the characteristics of a user from a particular website is crucial towards optimizing one’s website to the particular user base. Are the differences in operating system distribution a real difference in the traffic each individual site receives, or merely an indicator of the time and day usage patterns?