Re: Flash usage - 6.9% of Web users?

[John Dowdell]

At 3:30 AM 3/10/98, Andrew Ayres wrote:

>... However, a former colleague of mine (who's now programmer at

>BBC Online in London), is arguing there's no point in using Flash because

>only 6.9% of people have it. He got his stats from...

>http://vancouver-webpages.com/cgi-bin/rd-plugins-bycount



Hmm... the "BBC", eh?


I guess this *proves* that 66% of the English language consists of the

letter "B".... <eg>


(okay, okay, silly cheap shots aside, I promise.... ;)



That particular web-hosting service in Vancouver is indeed providing a

useful service, and I'd like to see more such actual monitoring come into

widespread use.


As Danny Hobart points out, a sample size of 1651 over the last 11 months

is quite small, particularly when there's no apparent cookie set. We don't

know the number of unique users or unique browsers that were sniffed for

those 1651 reports.


If you'll glance down the list you'll see multiple categories of Flash

players. The total number of Flash-enabled browsers they detected was more

than just the top category.


(See their "plugins-by-name" page for the 20 different "FutureSplash"

MIME-type reader categories.)


But the big kicker is that they're testing MIME types on NS3+ browsers.

This means that they're totally ignoring Flash ActiveX Controls. I can tell

you that the Flash ActiveX completed downloads dwarf that of plugin

downloads, in large part because of the nature of the OBJECT tag and the

newness of Smart Shockwave.


The majority platform that site deals with is Win3.1. Win95/NT approaches

that size. They have 40% IE3/4 viewers, 45% NS3/4 viewers. This implies

that they're only able to detect a small portion of the Flash-enabled

browsers that visit them.


(I viewed source of a number of their pages but couldn't tell which page

had the browser-detection, nor its implementation.)



Summary:


--  We could use more of this type of detection in the world.


--  It's particularly useful from your own site, and from sites with

audiences you'd like to attract, and for audience members who return you

the most value (commerce, subscriptions, etc).


--  It would also be useful in gauging *any* new technology adoption, such

as DHTML or Java or JavaScript or ActiveX or scriptlets or whatever.


--  As Wayne noted (and I'll grossly paraphrase), any measure needs to be

defined in context of the measurer, too.


--  It's an elementary error to not include ActiveX Controls in such a poll.


--  As Wayne also noted, most of us here are moving towards dynamic

media-substitution.



My latest mantra: What is the richest experience you can economically

provide to each individual user? What is the richest experience you can

economically provide to each individual user?



How does this bounce off of other listmembers here...?


jd






John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US


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