At Bright Side of News*, we want to follow market trends not just by reporting what market research groups are releasing to the general audience, but also to follow the profile of our readers. While designing the site, we were often faced with design choices - you noticed that we went with the 1050 pixel wide resolution.
Starting today, around every 24th in the month we'll show our monthly stats when it comes to our readers. We are paying attention to the resolution our readers use, browsers, operating systems, flash & java support - based on the information we receive, we will tailor our site and organize the content so that it gives the best viewing experience for majority of users.
These results come from 102,523 unique visitors that came to the site in period between April 23nd and May 23nd. We start off with the great regional divide. We use a combination of Google Analytics and Quantcast to get the information about what our readers are using.
BSN* readers by country
There are no secrets here - USA and the North American continent lead the way with an overall share of 45.21% of our readers in April. Looking at largest individual state, California itself had more visitors than Canada and we are happy to see people in the Silicon Valley and LA area choosing our site to get their daily news feed. UK, Germany and Australia complete the Top 5.
Screen Resolution
One of most important information for our current and future layouts is the targeted resolution. As you can see in the graph above, our decision to go with a 1050 pixel wide resolution was anappropriate one - being that 81% of our visitors used HD-capable displays, 9.90% used a 1024-pixel wide screen, while 11.10% of our readers used a non-standard resolution such as handheld screens (800x480, 480x240 etc.). When it comes to color depth, 32-bit color is used by 89.01% of all visitors, followed by 24-bit [9.01%] and 16-bit [1.93%].
Operating Systems
When it comes to the world of platforms, there is little doubt here - 89.50% of all visitors used a Windows operating system. Windows XP leads the way with 51.64%, followed by Vista and its 36.16%. The great surprise comes to us in the form of Windows NT 4.0 - 9.43% or almost 10% of all visitors in April used this operating system. Looking at operating systems in general, Apple follows with 5.51% of Mac OSX user and 3.56% of our readers used Linux. iPhone, iPod and BlackBerry are the most popular mobile browsers. Surprisingly, 0.19% used a PlayStation 3 console, predominately located in Japan.
Browser Wars
Looking at the software that our visitors used, we could conclude that most of users are tech-savvy and aware of consumer choice. Firefox takes 55.66% of the browser share, with 3.0.10 version taking more than half of those users - good to see you guys'n'girls upgrading to the latest versions of software.
Flash & Java
82.86% of visitors use Flash 10, while 83.11% of all visitors have support for Java. This data gives us great insight into what features should we implement with the upcoming versions of Bright Side of News*.
Conclusion: April 2009
Looking at these stats, we can conclude that vast majority of our users are technically-educated or have high awareness of their choices as a consumer of IT-related products. Widescreen formats dominate the resolution chart, and we will strive to give you the best experience in both width and length of the page.
We view our site as a living organism, and in the next couple of weeks, there is a lot of changes and upgrades coming online. If you have a comment on our site or would like to contribute, please contact us back at info@brightsideofnews.com or just leave a comment below this story.
