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Tuesday, July 17, 2012

From bad to worse and from good to great

From bad to worse and from good to great:
A year ago I noted that Apple could buy most of the mobile phone industry with cash on hand (excluding Samsung’s operations).
Since then Apple’s cash has grown significantly and the value of all phone vendors except Samsung has gone down significantly. The following chart shows the year ago and present day estimated market value of the industry participants.

Phone brands other than Samsung and iPhone have seen a reduction in market value of a combined 47%. That’s actually being quite generous since I’m valuing Motorola and Sony’s businesses at their acquisition prices. The operations of both those companies have continued to stagnate.
Based on the same multiple of estimated earnings Samsung grew its value by 157% and iPhone by 114% (note this excludes iPad).
In absolute terms the iPhone franchise created $244 billion in value while Samsung created $83 billion. The others destroyed $37 billion.
The good news is that the industry has had net value creation–always a healthy sign that innovation is being valued and absorbed.
The bad news is that there is vast income inequality. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting destitute. This is an unhealthy sign. The concentration of power and wealth may indicate a peaking of experimentation and discovery of new opportunities.
Also noteworthy is that almost all the value from the Android ecosystem is concentrated in Samsung. I did not include Google in this analysis since its mobile is so small as to be not visible in its accounting. A separate analysis of Android economics shows that Google’s benefit from the platform is modest. In contrast, Samsung, and Samsung alone, is benefitting greatly. It could even be said that today Samsung is the only Android profit engine.




Saturday, July 14, 2012

How many Lumia phones were sold in the US?

How many Lumia phones were sold in the US?:
Nielsen and comScore survey US consumers through different methodologies, however they both try to paint a picture of the smartphone patterns of ownership and consumption.
I regularly report on comScore’s data as it’s published on a monthly basis. Nielsen offers updates on a quarterly basis but there is more detail.
The latest report (for Q2) shows smartphone shares by both platform and vendor. The following graph is a treemap built with the Nielsen data:


The same data is also plotted below as a pie chart:

I also added the latest comScore mobiLens data in the pie chart to the right.
Note that both surveys agree in the main on the largest platforms. The difference seems to be within a reasonable margin of error. The details available in the Nielsen data are perhaps also interesting. The various Android OEM shares as well as the division between Windows Mobile base and Windows Phone (7) base could provide some insight. Nielsen’s total Windows base adds up to 4.5% while comScore reckons on 4%. Within that total, Nielsen breaks out 3.2% for Windows Mobile and 1.3% for Windows Phone. Within the Windows Phone total, HTC and Samsung are shown as having 0.5% and Nokia 0.3%.
If we then use comScore’s figure for total smartphone users (110 million) then the data would suggest that there are 330k Lumias in use in the US. This would have been accummulated over a sales period of about four months.

Friday, July 13, 2012

Update: Ice Cream Sandwich up 525% in Four Months, Jelly Bean Rolls Out

Update: Ice Cream Sandwich up 525% in Four Months, Jelly Bean Rolls Out:
Google’s Android is a dominant force in the mobile Operating System (OS) market but it’s not without its challenges. The same versatility that draws in many developers leads to one of Androids greatest difficulties: fragmentation. Android is currently used by a range of manufacturers on a multitude of devices, each having different update schedules and processes. Rapid releases of updated Android versions leading to increased fragmentation has been among the main reasons new Android OS versions have failed to quickly gain traction in the Android market.
With Android’s latest update, Jelly Bean, starting to roll out, Chitika Insights is interested in investigating the current level of fragmentation we are seeing in the Android market since our last report in March. We had found that after three months on the market, Ice Cream Sandwich was generating only 1.54% of all Android web traffic. This posed a stark contrast to Apple’s mobile Operating System, iOS (Android’s biggest competitor), where over 90% of iOS users were operating on the latest two versions, compared to 4.5% of users on Android 3.0 and 4.0 combined.
To quantify our latest study, Chitika Insights analyzed a sample of tens of millions of mobile ad impressions all running some version of Android OS, spanning a one week time frame, from July 3 – July 9, 2012. Web market share is composed by calculating the proportion of Android impressions represented by each version of the operating system. The resulting distribution shows the current levels of fragmentation within the Android market.
As we found in our previous report, Ginger Bread still takes the greatest share of the Android market with 71.1%, up slightly from 69.01% in March. Available since December 2010, Gingerbread’s features like on-screen keyboard, power and application management, speed and efficiency, have helped in maintaining the top spot. However, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) is chipping away at the market with a 9.63% share – a significant jump from 1.54%, seen in our last report.
So what’s the reason behind the surge in share for ICS? Google recently reported that ICS is now running on one in ten Android devices and sales for the newly launched Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC’s One X (both running ICS) have been stellar. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 – also running ICS – has fared well in the tablet market, coming in second place among top tablets in the market behind the dominant iPad.
The growth seen for the latest version of Android’s OS may be halted with the recent release of Jelly Bean (4.1), announced on July 11. Said to have many new improvements for the user experience, Jelly Bean is now available as an update on the HSPA+ Galaxy Nexus and will be available on the new Nexus 7 tablet.
The current levels of fragmentation, in addition to yet another update making its way into the market, may cause more problems for developers struggling to create applications supported across all versions of the Android OS. Furthermore, given Android is open-source, older versions of the OS are still used in new Tablets and mobile devices and are not providing users with the latest and greatest updates and features available today – a source of confusion and frustration for consumers. Despite issues with fragmentation, Android’s OS is still a force in the mobile market. The latest data from Chitika Insights Internet Access Platform Tracker shows Android has a 46.8% share of smartphone traffic, just behind iOS with 49.9%.
We will continue to monitor and report news on the Android market as Jelly Bean continues to roll out.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot:
Gartner has published preliminary PC unit sales for Q2. The data from Apple’s Mac sales has not been published yet but based on some estimates, we can draw a partial picture of the personal computer market.

My estimate is that the Windows PC market fell by 10% while the Mac market grew by 15%. Gartner reports an overall flat market. I’ll leave out the iPad for the time being, and show the growth of the Mac vs. Windows:

In terms of individual vendors vs. each other, the patterns are as follows:

It’s perhaps a bit early to tell, but if the Windows PC market continues to slow or contract, it may be possible that HP and Dell will cede their market share leadership positions to Lenovo and Acer. Already “Others” account for as many units as HP and Dell put together.
If we are to believe the analyst community reflects consensus, the industry, in the aggregate, continues to treat the potential for disruption from devices as unlikely. There always seems to be a wrinkle, a quirk, or an exceptional circumstance that is to blame. I won’t get into all the excuses given by analysts for the slowing of PC sales but will point out that there’s been a series of initiatives put forward by the industry to act as “catalysts” for growth. So far they have not worked. The current expectation is that Windows 8 will reverse this trend.
Perhaps. But perhaps the relief, if it comes at all, will be temporary.




Two Thirds of New Mobile Buyers Now Opting For Smartphones

Two Thirds of New Mobile Buyers Now Opting For Smartphones:
During Q2 2012 smartphone penetration continued to grow, with 54.9 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers owning smartphones as of June 2012. This growth is driven by increasing smartphone purchases: 2 out of 3 Americans who acquired a new mobile phone in the last three months chose a smartphone instead of a feature phone.
US Smartphone Operating System market share in June 2012
Android continues to lead the smartphone market in the U.S., with a majority of smartphone owners (51.8%) using an Android OS handset. Over a third (34.3%) of smartphone owners use an Apple iPhone, and Blackberry owners represented another 8.1 percent of the smartphone market.
Q2 2012 US Smartphone manufacturers share by operating system
Overall among smartphone owners, Apple had the highest manufacturer share of smartphone handsets. Among recent acquirers who obtained their smartphone during June 2012, 54 percent said they chose an Android handset and 36 percent bought an iPhone.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Mobile platform wars: Winners and losers in 2012

Mobile platform wars: Winners and losers in 2012:
[The game of ecosystems is in full bloom, with each player attempting to draw as many developers as possible around their platform. As we finally see some signs of consolidation, VisionMobile Senior Analyst Andreas Pappas, talks about the rules of engagement and identifies the winners and losers in this game of ecosystems in 2012. Also, we're proud to introduce VisionMobile Visualisations - live, interactive graphs with tons of data from the Developer Economics 2012 research!]
Below, we’d like to present a very small sample of our newly-launched Visualisations, depicting how Intentshare varies by the platform developers choose. The sample contains just one variable – for more filters and full functionality, visit data.visionmobile.com
INTENTSHARE INDEX

Percentage of developers planning to adopt each platform, irrespective of which platform they’re primarily using now.




The graph above is just a sample of what our new Visualisations can do – visit data.visionmobile.com for full functionality. Just bear in mind that you need a minimum resolution of 1024 × 768 px to access.
Developer Economics 2012 (free copy available here, thanks to the sponsorship by BlueVia) confirmed that reach remains the strongest motive for platform selection, as indicated by 54% of developers. With Android and iOS accounting for 82% of total smartphone sales in Q1 2012, according to IDC, these two platforms can now guarantee near ubiquitous smartphone reach for developers using them. As a result, developers’ mindshare is being increasingly dominated by these two platforms: Android is being used by three-quarters of developers and iOS is being used by 66% of developers.

Mobile development market is consolidating but still in early stages

This duopoly has resulted in development platform consolidation: in 2012 developers are using 2.7 platforms concurrently compared to 3.2 platforms last year. However, with less than 20% of mobile subscribers currently using smartphones, there are still opportunities for competitors to build up market share in the years to come: Ericsson estimates that the smartphone market will exceed 3 billion units in 2017 so the addressable market for all contenders is significantly larger than the current installed base which is slightly less than a billion.
So while developers are adopting the platforms with the highest reach, they are also keeping an eye and hedging their bets on the long-tail of platforms, i.e. those with lower reach but which allow them to extend their footprint to a wider user base or that will allow them to reach niche and underserved markets now and in the future. This is evidenced by Developer Mindshare for mobile web, Windows Phone and BlackBerry and the high Developer Intetshare for Windows Phone.
VisionMobile - Top platforms being used - Developer Economics 2012

Despite mobile browser fragmentation issues, mobile web is being used extensively by developers (53% Mindshare) as it provides a low-barrier, cross-platform entry point into mobile app development. While it trails behind native development platforms in terms of API richness and performance, it provides a good alternative in several cases, particularly when cross-platform development is important. Mobile web will continue to evolve and to integrate native features and while native apps will probably remain one step ahead, the choice between the two will not always be clear-cut.  As Tom Hume, founder of FuturePlatform argues, “User expectations will always be formed by the native platforms, and native will always be a step ahead of HTML, as that’s in the interest of platform vendors”. He explains that “today, HTML5 performs poorly with new user interface paradigms like Microsoft’s Metro UI. Tomorrow, HTML5 will need to catch up with ambient sensing. It’s always going to be a cat and mouse game.”
Windows Phone is the new cool: While Windows Phone sales continue to disappoint, a year on, with 2.6 million devices sold in Q1 2012, according to Gartner, interest among developers continues to build up. The Developer Economics 2012 survey indicated that irrespective of which platform they currently use most, the majority of developers who plan to adopt a new platform, plan to adopt Windows Phone (57%). Overall, 42% of developers using iOS and Android indicate that they plan to adopt Windows Phone and while the intention is slightly stronger among developers using mobile web (44%) or other, less popular platforms, intention doesn’t seem to vary significantly by the platform developers currently use.
At the same time, seeing as last year’s 32% Intentshare for Windows Phone added only 1% to this year’s actual Mindshare, it becomes clear that converting intention to adoption is not a given. Windows Phone is indeed the new cool, a platform generating increasing developer buzz and anticipation; but to turn the buzz into developer buy-in at the levels of iOS and Android, actual adoption must follow soon or fall flat.
To attract more developers into Windows Phone, Microsoft also needs to rethink its tool strategy. At present, developing on Windows Phone 7 requires a Windows PC, which presents a barrier to entry for iOS developers and the many web developers who are using a Mac. Support of WP7 development on a Mac is therefore crucial for reducing the onboarding friction for iOS and web developers.
There are indications that Windows Phone sales are picking up in China and the US although the growth is nowhere near the rates that iOS and Android devices achieved in their first years since launch.

Survival of the fittest: platforms disappearing into oblivion

As with previous Developer Economics reports, we measured each platform’s defection rate, i.e., the percentage of developers who recently abandoned or plan to abandon each platform. BREW and Symbian fared the worst. They do not lack scale; on the contrary, BREW is still strong in the feature-phone segment, and Nokia shipped in four times more Symbian devices than Windows Phone devices in Q1 2012. Yet, both ecosystems lack the ingredients necessary to generate the kind of network effects enjoyed by iOS or Android.
BREW, the first mobile platform with an app store (launched by Qualcomm in 2001) is approaching the end of its shelf life. After some initial success attracting carrier attention, BREW failed to compete against low-end Android designs targeting similar market segments. However, developer exodus is a much greater and more measurable testament to the terminal decline of BREW than any other market indicator: 60% of developers now using BREW indicate they plan to stop using it. We therefore believe that Qualcomm is quietly preparing to discontinue or sell the platform.
Not surprisingly, following last year’s burning-platform drama by Nokia, Symbian showed the second-highest rate of developer attrition among the platforms in our survey. Developers see little reason to invest time or effort in the platform, given its effective end-of-shelf-life somewhere in 2013. Symbian developer abandonment rate has rapidly accelerated from 39% of developers last year to 52% in 2012. Clearly, developers heeded Nokia when it unambiguously declared it would bet its smartphone business on Microsoft.
Despite substantial handset shipments – 11 million units in Q1 2012 – and the promise of a completely revamped BB 10 platform in the second half of 2012, BlackBerry is very close to becoming an endangered species. RIM has had significant difficulties competing with iOS and Android as its USP, based on messaging, is becoming increasingly irrelevant with email and instant-messaging now being commonplace features across all platforms. As a result, RIM experienced a 25% year- on-year decline in shipments in Q1 2012, with investors pressing the company to break up and sell its assets.
BlackBerry is being abandoned by a relatively larger number of developers that use it as their main platform (14%), when compared to other major platforms and a large number of developers overall (41%). There are still developers that are loyal to BlackBerry and the platform continues to bring in more revenues on average than any other platform (4% more than iOS and 41% more than Android). Development costs are also significantly lower on BB OS: we calculated that the average development cost for a BlackBerry app is around $15,000 while Android and iOS apps cost around $22,000 and $27,000, on average, respectively. But unless RIM manages to reverse the downward trend in sales, these revenue and cost advantages will soon become meaningless.
In yet another sign of industry consolidation, Samsung’s Bada platform is high on the list of platforms being abandoned. Some 49% of developers currently using Bada plan to drop it. Bada is Samsung’s application platform for low end smartphones, with 20 million units sold cumulatively since its launch in 2010. In Q1 2012, Bada shipments grew only 10% year-over-year, reaching 3.8 million devices. This lacklustre growth has developers flocking away to platforms seen as safer investments. Other challenges, for Bada, include its immaturity and substantial bug count, low-end smartphone hardware, and a lack of consumer pull leading to missing “hero apps,” like Angry Birds. The resulting mindshare churn should ring alarm bells at the Korean HQ, since Samsung needs Bada as a negotiating card against Google’s Android. With a weakening developer ecosystem, Bada looks to be niching itself to mostly Korean developers, and Samsung risks losing bargaining power as a result.

Mobile development has become commoditised

Contrary to popular perception that has developers of different platforms on opposite camps, in practice developers will overcome any barriers (e.g. learning curves, monetisation) and adopt any platform that gives them reach. Amidst the debate over the relative merits and drawbacks of iOS and Android, interestingly, most developers use both at the same time: 72% of developers that use iOS, also use Android, while 64% of developers using Android also use iOS.  With switching costs and learning curves on mobile development being lower than ever, developer mobility across platforms is higher than ever and improvements in cross-platform development will increase mobility even further.
In such an environment, platforms that provide reach (Android, iOS) will retain and attract developers as long as they continue to provide reach. However, platforms with lower reach (e.g. Windows Phone) will only attract developers if they extend their reach and at the same time provide additional incentives to compensate developers for the platform’s reach-deficit. In order to do so they need to identify the developers they need to get on-board and find the right incentives to attract them. This becomes an almost impossible task without using a proper segmentation model.
However, traditional segmentation models, based on the developer career stage (student vs pro), demographics (income or age), technologies (programming language or platform) or app category (games vs enterprise developers) rarely yield actionable results. An alternative is to take a “job-based” segmentation approach. As Professor Christensen defines it: “A job is the fundamental problem a customer needs to resolve in a given situation.”
In Developer Economics 2012, we used both empirical knowledge and quantitative data from our survey of 1,500+ developers to arrive at a definitive job-based developer segmentation. Our segmentation model consists of eight developer segments, divided according to developer motivations, the platform they primarily use and their decision criteria for adopting a platform, tool or API. These are: the Hobbyists, the Explorers, the Hunters, the Guns for Hire, the Product Extenders, the Digital Media Publishers, the Gold Seekers and the Corporate IT developers.
We believe that this segmentation model is instrumental for both developers (to understand their own competitive ecosystem) and for companies producing platforms, tools or APIs (to understand who the right developer is and how and where to approach them).

Monday, July 09, 2012

Activating 5.6 million units per day

Activating 5.6 million units per day:
Google reported a new activation rate milestone: 1 million/day.
The rate of activations has been increasing steadily which leads to a question: how high can it go?
The answer is easy to determine. It can go no higher than the sales rate of phones and tablets and PCs. So what’s that sales rate? The answer is to take sales (shipments actually) per category and cast the data as “activations”.
The result is shown in the chart below:

Defined as “activations” device and computers are being adopted at the rate of about 5.6 million units per day.
As a percent of total activations, Android is running at about 15% and iOS is at 10%. Android has already overtaken Windows activations and with the new iPhone, it’s likely iOS will do as well this year.
In terms of available headroom this means that iOS and Android are running at a combined share of 25% of available activations.  They both should consider that three quarters of the opportunity is left to go.
Will iOS and Android reach a duopoly in terms of activations, topping 5 million per day? Probably not, at least not without some fragmentation or platform diversification (to put it nicely). Nevertheless, 3 to 4 million per day seems an easy target to set.

RIM’s tailspin

RIM’s tailspin:
The number of BlackBerry phones sold fell 41% year-on-year in the last RIM fiscal quarter. Sequentially the fall was 30%. Though surprisingly poor, I note that Nokia’s smartphone business fell even more dramatically last quarter (down 50% y/y and 39% sequentially). LG also saw a 44% decline in unit shipments in Q1.
The history of smartphone shipments for the largest vendors is shown in the following chart:

From forecasts made by Huawei it’s probable that they overtook RIM in the last quarter, dropping RIM to 5th or 6th ranked vendor in smartphone units.
RIM’s 7.8 million units is the same level of sales as it had in early 2009. The total market was only about 250 million units per quarter then. It’s around 400 million today. A quick calculation shows that RIM’s smartphone market share has fallen from a peak of 22% to about 6%.
RIM’s stock performance reflects this performance relative to the market.

Hardware revenues were $1.652 billion. Matt Richman calculates the average hardware revenues for the BlackBerry of $203. I include service revenues in my ASP calculations (for Nokia and Apple these are also significant values) yielding $309 per BlackBerry. The history of total revenues, revenues per phone and operating margins are shown below relative to competitors.

Operating margin tells the most sobering story. As I’ve often repeated, historically no company has survived dipping into the grey zone.
To reiterate, the logic of irrevocability in this industry is as follows:
Success depends on three conditions being met by the vendor’s products:
  • consumers trust the platform’s promise
  • operator see the product as creating value to their core business
  • developers offer investment to innovate on top of the platform
If all these factors are present, the vendor enjoys a virtuous cycle of growth. If any of these is lost, the others are also likely to be lost as well creating a vicious cycle of decline.
Loss of operating margin is an early indicator that at least one condition is not met. Usually, a failure of consumer trust leads to a drop in purchases which leads operators and distributors and retailers to flee and then developers defect.
It’s been impossible to recover from this tailspin so far. There is a procedure which works in theory: accelerate downward by investing in a new platform. The move is counter-intuitive but essential in re-building trust, quality and relationships.
However, the reason it does not work in practice is that this struggle is not with gravity alone. While spinning downward, the company is also subject to competitive attack. Competitors fill the void and take customers into locked-in ecosystems. There is neither the time nor the ability to defend.
Cash runs out and customers are divided up between the survivors. Nokia and RIM face this scenario today.




At 50% penetration the US smartphone market is not showing signs of saturation

At 50% penetration the US smartphone market is not showing signs of saturation:
According to comScore, as of end of May,  the ratio of consumer phone users in the US (aged more than 13) who use smartphones as their primary phone has reached 47%.
The question is whether this is reaching saturation. My guess has been that saturation will be at levels well above 80%. The data shows that during May the rate of smartphone adoption (first time users) was 630k/week. This number is a good recovery to above the historic mean indicative that saturation is not yet in effect.

50% penetration will happen this summer. A year ago the predicted “tipping point” date was also the same: August 2012.
The platform shares data is also returning to a historic consistency. A month ago I asked if there was “trouble with the robot”  because Android net adds dropped to a level unseen for two years and the decline in net adds had been going on for four months.
This last report shows a recovery in Android net adds to about 1.5 million new users.

[Note here too that there is no sign of saturation: The net user gains are far above net user losses. Even BlackBerry showed a gain. In a market where there is saturation, net gains and losses among platforms would balance each other out.]
In terms of share, Android shows two months of no growth. The following charts show the history of platforms in terms of share and actual units in area and line charts.

I’d say the jury is still out on whether Android has “peaked” in the US. Globally, the rate of additions seems to still be increasing but in the US we might be seeing the effect of upgrades as many first time Android buyers are reaching the end of their contracts. iPhone and Android “purchase rates” are already at parity but the install base might take some time to converge.
With half the population still not using smartphones, there is still headroom for the platforms, but the inter-platform dynamics are becoming very interesting.




Web Browser Market Share, June 2012 Update

Web Browser Market Share, June 2012 Update:

Search Engine Market Share, June 2012 Update

Search Engine Market Share, June 2012 Update:

Netcraft web server stats 2003-2012 in one chart

Netcraft web server stats 2003-2012 in one chart:
web server surveyToday Netcraft released its web server survey for July 2012, and we know many of you hurried to read how things have developed since last month (as did we).
What we’ve done is collect Netcraft’s data going back to 2003 and put that in one spreadsheet, which makes it easier to see how things have developed over the last 9 years or so. You can see the rise of NGINX, the fall of a few servers, as well as the continued domination of Apache.
Remember http://png.dm/netcraftstats. That’s the URL for a Google Doc you can come back to each month. As soon as there are new numbers out from Netcraft, we’ll add them to the document. You can see the numbers as well as the chart, which currently looks like this:
netcraft web server survey
Note that the information in the spreadsheet is what Netcraft calls “Total Sites Across All Domains”.
We hope you will find this useful.
Image (top) via Shutterstock.
This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Mobile Manufacturer Market Share, June 2012 Update

Mobile Manufacturer Market Share, June 2012 Update:

Operating System Market Share, June 2012 Update

Operating System Market Share, June 2012 Update:

Flash cut in half in 2 years – now only 7% of average web page size

Flash cut in half in 2 years – now only 7% of average web page size:
According to the HTTP Archive, sites get bigger as Flash fades
We know that webpages on average are getting bigger, and that Adobe Flash is slowly fading away. But even if we tell you that the average web page has since 2010, grown from 702 kB to 1,090 kB, wouldn’t it be even better to visualize it?
Of course it would! So, with the help of data from the HTTP Archive, that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Web pages are getting bigger

First, let’s look at how the individual components of web pages tracked by the HTTP Archive have developed since November 2010. We can see that images have taken off quite dramatically in size, as have scripts. There appears to be a noticeable decline in the size of Flash files. When it comes to HTML, stylesheets and the rest, there doesn’t seem to have been much change.
Average bytes per web page per content type
If we instead aggregate the data, basically stack each type of content on top of one another, we get a much better sense of how much bigger the average web page is today.
Average bytes per web page per content type: aggregated view

But relative size has changed very little

If everything except Flash is growing, what is growing the most? Measured in kilobytes, as you can see above, it’s clear that images are getting larger in combined size as are scripts.
But what if we instead look at what percentage out of the average web page is HTML, stylesheets, images, etc?
Average bytes per web page per content type: relative view
In this view, where 100% represents the total size of a web page, we can see that scripts and images increase some in relative size, and that stylesheets, as well as HTML, has lost out a bit in relative terms. The biggest change, however, is Flash, which has seen its share of the typical web page almost cut in half.
For each type of content, here is the change from November 2010 to July 2012:
  • Images: from 59% to 63%
  • Scripts: from 16% to 19%
  • Stylesheets: from 4% to 3%
  • Flash: from 13% to 7% (in absolute terms, Flash has “only” been reduced from 90 kB to 81 kB)
  • Other: unchanged at 3%
  • HTML: from 5% to 4%

What will it look like in another two years?

From this quick comparison, it’s clear that images and scripts take up, relatively speaking, a larger portion of the complete size of websites today, and Flash is slowly disappearing. And when you put Flash against the seemingly ever-increasing size of web pages, Flash is losing out even more.
We will certainly keep an eye on how this develops. If we do a follow-up study in 2014, what do you think will be the main changes? Surely, Flash is still around, but how small
Image (top) via Shutterstock.
This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.