Digging Into Flash Player Penetration Statistics

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I think we all follow the release of the Flash Player penetration statistics very closely, but I had an interesting email the other day asking about an independent verification of these numbers. I’ve started wondering about this the past few weeks, and wanted to see what people on MXNA had to say. Are there any other surveys or datasets that verify the penetration of the Flash Player?

The methodology of the NPD survey sheds some light on how they get the numbers, and while it seems to be as scientific as possible, it’s still a survey. I assume there are statistics from individual Flash developers who track the versions that come to their site, but I’m not sure. If you have some info, leave them in the comments or feel free to email me.

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  • http://www.actionscript.com Satori Canton

    I’ve been wondering about this for a while now. I checked out the methodology a few months ago and thought it was a little biased. The problem is the survey tests if you have the player on the computer you’re currently useing (assuming it’s your primary computer). But most people use more than one computer. One at work, one at home, a laptop, a mac, etc.

    I realize I’m a developer so I have more computers than a normal user. But even my own computers (as a Flash developer) often had older versions of the player or no player depending on the box. I surveyed the ladies in accounting at the office and none of them had Flash installed on their machines.

    My mother (who wouldn’t even use a computer six/seven years ago) has at least three computers that I know of. But I’m sure she doesn’t have the newest version of the player on all of them.

    While it may be true that 95% of users on the Internet have access to “some” version of the Flash player. I don’t think it’s anywhere near 95% of machines connected to the net. Which they don’t claim, but they often imply when talking about the numbers.

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    The NPD/MediaMetrix consumer audits, which have been commissioned by Macromedia since the late ’90s, work by asking their regular online consumer focus groups “Can you see this page, in your current browser, as it is currently configured? How about this page? this page? this…?” Such a methodology is good for testing overall consumer norms, but would not indicate much about special audiences (a particular intranet, a particular school district, etc).

    Site-specific visitor audits are valuable, but differ with the audience for each site.

    In the past there have been stats published which are derived from multi-site tracking mechanisms (HitBox, WestSideStory, etc). They usually don’t publish their methodologies, but many have seemed to rely on serverside detection mechanisms, which are of untestable accuracy.

    Bottom line, the NPD consumer audits are very useful for what they are, but they aren’t everything. Despite all that, we’re all pretty convinced now that new SWF capabilities are adopted by the world more quickly than any other capabilities are adopted… the pull of so much strong content in the world directly helps consumer increase their predictable clientside abilities.

  • Ryan Stewart

    Satori, if you find anything let me know.

    JD, thanks for responding. I have no doubt that Flash penetration is what it is, and that it has the fastest penetration of any other options there, but it would be interesting to see a different set of statistics. Doesn’t seem like they exist though. I’ll keep using the NDP stats.

  • dmendels

    Hi Ryan,

    Not sure of when this will be released, but the research team here just commisioned a different third party to do a similar study in parallel to NPD to verify it with a completely different sample and expand to more countries internationally. The data held up well with a few minor variations by country. I think this will get published with the next release of such data, but not sure of the plans off the top of my head.

    -David
    Adobe

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