According to a Net Applications Survey Mac adoption rose with an increase to 7.1% of the total market share for web browsers (as in clients not in actual web browsing programs, that’s how MarketShare collects OS stats). Looking at the stats there is also a rise in Linux desktop users who have risen to .63% of the total market a rise of 10% versus the Net Applications reported .57% share Linux held in November.

One interesting side note is that their is no way to account for those users running Windows via Bootcamp or virtual machines (Parallels, VMware). It would be interesting to see what the actual native OS numbers look like. Interestingly both Windows Vista and XP saw rises too, so I have to wonder what is the statistical significance and accuracy of the data or if the multiple OSes on a single machine might have an effect on this. 

Technorati Tags: Desktop, Linux, Mac, market share, Net Applications

The New York Times is reporting the market share for Google has reached 65% of U.S. searches for November 2007 according to Hitwise. Followed by Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Ask.

(via Matt)

Technorati Tags: Ask, Google, market share, MSN, Yahoo!

Maggie has a great set of statistics from her ROI of Communities Series. Pardon the total duplication of the stats but I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose these numbers.

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004)
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKinsey, 2000)
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKinsey, 2000)
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)

As a community manager I myself I am always looking for concrete statistics to help explain why there is value for companies to build online communities.

I also found The Online Community Research Network (OCRN) from Maggie’s comment feed. OCRN is a collaborative effort of online community professionals to better understand the principal challenges of building and managing online communities .
The also offer the following free reports that are helpful

- Online Community Metrics (free download)
- Online Community ROI (free download)

Lots of data to digest but very good stuff.

(via Anne)

Technorati Tags: community building, Online Community, Online Community Research Network, ROI