Category: Trending Topics

Live Tracker: Facebook IPO Activity

Today, May 18th, Facebook is going public after many months of deliberation, rumor, and speculation. The release of Facebook’s original S-1, aggressive acquisitions (Instagram), concerns over revenue, and a demand-driven expansion of their public offering have only served to fan the flames. Chitika Insights wanted to see how the fervor surrounding this IPO corresponds to Web activity – a good indicator of consumer interest rather than activity from traders in brokerages and investment firms.

Facebook IPO Tracker Methodology

With Facebook’s estimated $16 billion IPO today, Chitika Insights wanted to provide a visualization of how people are interacting with the offering over many aspects of the Web. To accomplish this, Chitika Insights performed an analysis of two key indicators: Facebook’s current stock market price via a Yahoo! Finance API, and queries for Facebook IPO and related searches on North American search engines. Here, we describe the methodology of our new tracker.

Firefox Version Tracker Methodology

To see what percentage of Firefox users within the Chitika network are running each version of Firefox, Chitika Insights performed an analysis of the unique impressions seen within the Chitika Ad network and determined the share of these impressions represented by each respective version by analyzing the user agent of each impression. The following paragraphs detail the methodology behind the Firefox Version Tracker coming out of Chitika Insights.

Unemployment Rates Correspond to Online Search Interest for Jobs

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest figures on unemployment on May 4, 2012, which indicate that the country’s unemployment rate has dropped from 8.5% (December 2011 figure) to 8.1% at the end of April. Given that the Internet is the job-search method of choice for those seeking employment, Chitika Insights wanted to see how unemployment rates affect internet users search behavior. Specifically, we wanted to see if states with higher unemployment rates boasted a higher percentage of search queries that we job related.

Research: Firefox 12 Second-Most Popular Version in First Week

Open source icon Mozilla Firefox has grown to command a substantial level of market share within the Internet browser marketplace. Due to the free software’s unique nature as an open source project, maximizing the adoption rate of Firefox’s latest version is important in order to maintain the security of its users, while also ensuring that the software’s millions-strong user base won’t be shut out on some of the latest and greatest features available on the Web. To visualize the rate of adoption, Chitika Insights tracked how many people have switched over to the 12th version of Firefox since April 24 – covering its first week of wide release.

Study: Apple iPad Accounts for 94.64% of all Tablet Web Traffic

What do you think of when you hear the word “tablet”? For most it would be Apple or more specifically the iPad. When the iPad was released in 2010 it quickly gained popularity amongst the masses. Since then the market share held by Apple’s iPad has been increasing steadily. Chitika Insights conducted a research study to quantify just how much web traffic share iPad tablets are are taking up by digging into our network data.

Study: Windows 8 Consumer Preview Usage Doubles that of Mac OS X Mountain Lion

Chitika Insights has been following the progress of the Windows 8 launch dating back to 2011, when usage was significantly below the newly touted levels. Now that the Windows 8 Consumer Preview has had some time to gain a foothold in the market, Chitika Insights has conducted a new research study to determine its current rate of adoption in the U.S and Canada.

Study: Search Traffic Pattern Investigation by Device Operating System

For the last decade, search engines have been internet users’ best friends, making any question that comes to mind immediately addressable with the best relevant answers. Developments in technology have made search engine results more qualified and useful, leading to a rapidly growing demand for their use. Chitika Insights decided to take a look into search traffic trends depending on the operating system.