Obscure Statistics

While looking over last month’s statistics for our website https://www.mymac.com, I came across something I think you’ll find extremely interesting. Among the many dull and obscure statistics a set of numbers caught my attention: a report showing the different operating systems used by the computers that access mymac.com.

Here are some figures from a week in October:

Considering that the ‘unknown’ statistic covers the other operating systems (Sun OS, Amiga OS, WebTV, UNIX console, etc.) and proprietary software, I was surprised at the findings. Sure, the most popular in this two-week period was the Mac OS with over 55,000 users accessing the site, but Windows users collectively totalled 25,237. In other words, out of 82,863 hits, approximately 30% of the people going to our website were, at least during that period, non-Macintosh users!

What is so interesting about all this? Well, it shows that perhaps Windows users are more open-minded than many Mac users would give credit. Of course, it’s entirely possible many of these Windows “users” may just be people at their workplace accessing our site from a company computer, the majority of which are unfortunately Wintel boxes (as is the case where I work), and that could easily account for about 50% of the total Windows users listed above. But that also means there were about 12,500 people open-minded enough to access a website dedicated to the discussion and enhancement of an operating system other than their own!

So why are these people tuning in? It can’t be because they’re looking for tips on using Windows, that’s for sure. Nor do we have any Windows software to download. And it certainly can’t be that they logged onto here by mistake, because a domain name like www.mymac.com leaves little doubt as to our purpose or content. And so the question remained: why are so many Windows people logging on?

True, they may be clicking in just to read some of the excellent articles we offer every month, but our fiction is nearly all Mac-centric and often fairly caustic tales of intrigue from the Dark Side. I know we enjoy them, but could so many Windows people feel the same way?

But then the inevitable truth struck me. These callers could simply be prospective new customers looking to learn something about the Macintosh. And that, to me at least, became a very exciting prospect.

Now, let’s take this one step further. Let’s assume that only half of those people already own a computer at home. The rest are using the computer at work, which is, as we said earlier, usually a Windows machine. That leaves over 6,000 people visiting My Mac Magazine using a Windows machine who have no computer at home and are curious about the Macintosh platform. Now we’re talking about 6,000 potential Macintosh buyers!

Now, if just half of the people in this group decided to purchase an iMac, that would translate to nearly $4,000,000 in sales for the iMac alone, and that’s not counting printers, scanners, etc. But let’s be even more conservative and assume that only 25% of these people actually buy an iMac. That is still about $2,000,000 in sales plus all the trimmings. $2,000,000+. All that from Windows users going on-line and reading My Mac Magazine.

Now if My Mac Magazine is supplying Apple with almost two million dollars in revenue for this single two-week time frame alone, would it be out of line for us to ask Apple to loan a few iMacs to us for all our hard work promoting their products?

Seems fair to me…

---

Tim Robertson
publisher@mymac.com