Operating System Market Share

Displays the current operating system market share (actually, usage share)This report lists the market share of the top operating systems in use for browsing (not servers). This data is derived by aggregating the traffic across our network of websites that use our service.

We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of HitsLink Analytics and SharePost clients. The network includes over 40,000 websites, and spans the globe. We ‘count’ unique visitors to our network sites, and only count one unique visit to each network site per day. This is part of our quality control process to prevent fraud, and ensure the most accurate portrayal of Internet usage market share. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million unique visits per month. The information published on www.netmarketshare.com is an aggregation of the data from this network of hosted website traffic statistics. In addition, we classify 430+ referral sources identified as search engines. Aggregate traffic referrals from these engines are summarized and reported monthly. The statistics for search engines include both organic and sponsored referrals.

This data provides valuable insight into significant trends for internet usage. These statistics include monthly information on key statistics such as browser trends (e.g. Internet Explorer vs. Firefox market share), search engine referral data (e.g. Yahoo vs. Bing vs. Google traffic market share) and operating system share (Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux market share or even the iOS market share vs. Android) The data is made available free of charge on a monthly basis that includes monthly usage market share and trends for browsers, operating systems and search engines. An upgraded version is available that provides reports by geolocation, preview weekly data and other features.

Additional estimates about the website population:

76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.
43% are commerce sites
18% are corporate sites
10% are content sites
29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..)