[thelist] Browser Stats

Michael Kimsal michael at tapinternet.com
Wed Aug 28 23:36:01 CDT 2002


> aardvark wrote:
>
>> i'm still having trouble considering 1 million people to be an
>> insignificant number...
>

I don't know why.  Everything is relative.  When you are
talking about hundreds of millions or billions of something, one
million *IS* insignificant.

When you're 4 years old, 10 seems ancient.  When you're
80 you see that 10 is pretty insignificant.

>>
>> 3% may be an insignificant fraction to you, but i do know many
>> clients who consider 3% to be an unacceptable loss of viewership...
>> imagine you've been hired to redesign a site and tell the client that
>> they will lose 3% of their readers... or better yet, tell them that
>> they will block out 1 million people... see how they dig that...
>
Yes, if you walk up to someone and say
"you're going to lose 1 million potential customers because of this
particular code" and leave it at that, yes, some might freak out.

Follow it up with "but by doing this, we're making your business
more attractive and accessible to 279 million people" and the
discussion would be over.

Take it further:
2 million potential customers won't ever do business with you
because of some article in 'Christianity Today' which linked
your product with Satan.

4 million people won't do business with you because your
spokeswoman just announced she's got a live-in lesbian lover.

1.5 million people won't do business with you because you
do business with a company in South Africa

3 million people won't do business with you because the CEO
was too chummy with Clinton in 2000 and they think
your company is a bunch of left-wing nuts.

All those numbers seem big, but they're not that big, and they
only represent potential, not hard numbers.

If, as I said before, you ran a '1992-era mac hardware' website,
yes, requiring IE6 and Flash might be stupid.  But you wouldn't
be alienating 3% of your visitors - you'd probably be alienating
70-80% of your potential customers.  Even if the total potential
customer base was 50,000, 70% is a big portion.

Statistically 3% is nothing.  A blip on the radar.  That's why most
poll reports say 'margin of error + or - 4 points", cause it's hard to
measure things accurately at such small percentages.

By all means, keep writing decent HTML which should work OK
across older browsers.  But for goodness' sake don't go out of your
way to support NS3 or something similarly ancient.  Those browsers
deserve to be put to rest.

Michael Kimsal
http://www.logicreate.com
734-480-9961





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