Technology usage reports extended

Posted by Sam Soltano on 30 August 2010 in News

We always showed market shares when we reported technology usage. This was sometimes unsatisfactory for two reasons.

First, people occasionally used our reports to estimate the absolute number of sites that use a certain technology, say a certain content management system. The market share is not sufficient to derive these numbers. Now, you can see that, for example, Wordpress is used by 12% of the top 1 million websites, that is approximately 120,000 sites.

Second, people occasionally misinterpreted our data. For instance, people were using our reports to say that Google Analytics is used by 80% of the websites, when we only reported an 80% market share. Of course, we clearly said in our descriptions what the figures mean, but we appreciate that the web is not a place where people carefully read descriptions. Now you can see both of these figures, absolute usage and market share, and we hope there is less room now for misinterpretations.

Please note, that this new distinction does not make sense for categories of technologies that are used by every site. One example are top level domains. Obviously, every site uses a top level domain, it does not make sense to distinguish between absolute usage figures and "market share". Other examples are content languages, operating systems and web servers. A borderline case are server side programming languages. While there certainly are still websites around that are entirely made of static HTML pages, we think they are rare exceptions now. Therefore, we decided for simplicity, to assume that every website uses at least one server side language, and we don't distinguish market share and absolute usage figures.

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