Is he talking about myspace or Adobe?

CF 5 was never used on any of the old macromedia.com sites, CF MX(6) was the first version used on macromedia.com. And it was updated to MX7 the week that was released. So CF 5 was never used here.

He must have been talking about myspace. In that case, no comment.

Both adobe.com and macromedia.com were PageRank 10 sites already, mainly because of the inbound links on web pages (“Get Player” etc).

But this study talks about “20,000,000+ unique site visitors per month”. Their measurement is apparently based on 2,000,,000 who have installed “The Compete Toolbar”, a Windows-only browser extension, originally for MS IE, now also available for Firefox. They then weight this data in various ways, add in “ISP data” for people not on Windows, and give a result.

May mean something, may not. Alexa Toolbar uses a similar methodology, and has been subject to many accuracy questions over the years. When you’re projecting data from a small and constrained sample set, the results might always be useful to consider, but don’t always match up with the actual worldly phenomenon you’re trying to model.

How many unique monthly visitors does adobe.com get? I don’t know, but I’ll ask folks on the web team next week, see if there are public stats. Most Player and Reader installations never result in a site visit… Internet Explorer’s ActiveX happens in the background; all they see is a dialog box.

I don’t see the download stats myself, but the word I hear is that daily Player installations have been consistently in the 5-6 million range — when a new Player starts up the first time it pings the Adobe site. There’s been a spike upwards in December, seeing nine million completed installations some days, all to addresses in China… suspect it was the Zhang Yu scandal video which caused the rise.

But again, only people in non-IE actually visit the site for an installation. And it’s unclear how accurately the study’s headlines match the world.

But, you know… looking at these numbers again… they say Yahoo is tops in site visitors, with 120 million a month… meanwhile we know that Adobe Flash Player 9 is being added to the machines of over 150 million people each month. That seems rather astonishing, doesn’t it…?

jd