Behind Thurrott.com: Who Are You?

It’s been an embarrassing amount of time since the last article in this series, apologies. I’m experiencing a weird paralysis on this despite having so much to write about. But thanks to a question in the comments to the most recent Ask Paul, I did 10 seconds of research in Raptive and Google Analytics. And I thought you might find this interesting. Mostly because this is about you. And us, really.

As a bit of background, I’ve been writing professionally for almost 30 years but I’ve done so largely in a void of my own making. That is, the topics I choose to write about are by nature interesting to me, and if I connect with those who read what I write, it’s often because we share those interests. That’s how I see it, anyway.

This seems to work pretty well—it has been almost 30 years, after all—but others with more of a business mindset than I have tried to interject from time to time with actual data. When I was at Windows IT Pro, for example, someone started sending me reports about which articles I wrote each month that “performed” the best, a metric that is perhaps more nuanced than may be immediately obvious, meaning that it’s not as simple as “page reads” or “hits,” a term you don’t hear anymore. (And in a weird coincidence, this is a topic I’ve set aside for a future Behind Thurrott.com article. Sigh.)

This happened again at BWW—to his credit, George was very data-driven—and, God help us all, with my wife since we took over Thurrott.com: She sends out monthly reports now about the articles that have performed the best too. I guess we’ve come full circle.

I’ll save my thoughts on the usefulness of article performance reports for that future article because it’s an interesting topic on its own. But raw data is often interesting, whether it’s product or service market share or usage share or, in this case, analytic data related to websites like this one. And while this is literally a topic I don’t think about at all for the most part, that reader question I mentioned sent me down a little rabbit hole this morning that I think, as noted above, you will find interesting. I certainly did.

The question was whether I had any stats on the browsers people use to access this site, and it came out of a broader discussion about testing alternative browsers. And … um. I have—had—no idea.

I did have this vague understanding that desktop and mobile browser usage on Thurrott.com was pretty close, like a 55 percent (desktop) to 45 percent (mobile) split, and that this fact helped drive last year’s site redesign. But as for actual browser usage … nothing.

So I asked my wife. She sends Laurent and me the monthly article performance report, after all. But she had no idea either. Knowing that she uses the Raptive dashboard for this data, my next question was, is this something I can look at myself? Which I assume tells you that my comments above about remaining purposefully ignorant and winging it are true.

But I was already signing in to Raptive by the time she came over to discuss this, and go figure, I can of course access this data. But Raptive had nothing to say on this topic. It told me that 53 percent of page views came from desktop, 43 percent came from mobile (smartphones), and 3.5 percent came from tablets. And that most readers, a bit under a third, came from the United States, followed by the UK, Canada, India, Australia, and Sweden. (Note to self: Lighten up on the CMA, already.)

Raptive is the service we use for ad sales and it uses Google Analytics under the covers. And so I spent a painful amount of time signing into that service for reasons that are too dumb to discuss in detail. (Short version: My [email protected] is tied to BWW in Analytics and Google will not let me change that, so I had to create a new account for this kind of thing and then switch over several services. Just thinking about this still makes me upset.) And … there it was. The data.

34.6 percent of Thurrott.com readers accessed the site using Windows over the past month, compared to 25 percent for Android, 21 percent for iPhone and iPad, 11 percent for Mac, and—huh—7.4  percent for Linux. (Note to self: Stop procrastinating on the Linux stuff.)

Addressing the question that kicked this all off, the vast majority of readers who visited Thurrott.com in the past month, or 57 percent, did so using Chrome. Safari was a strong number two, with 23 percent usage (this includes both the standalone browser and “Safari (in-app)”). Edge was third, with 12.7 percent. And Firefox was fourth, with 4.1 percent. Opera is way down there with Samsung Internet and even Amazon Silk, but nothing for Brave or Vivaldi; if they’re under “Mozilla Compatible Agent,” their usage is negligible. (Note to self: Maybe my endless Brave proselytizing is turning people off?)

The top screen resolution used by readers (16 percent) is Full HD (1920 x 1080), but it’s weird to me that the second and third most used display resolutions are 390 x 844 and 800 x 600, followed by 2560 x 1440, 1536 x 864, and, wait what, 412 x 932. I suspect these are due to screen scaling.

The demographic data is, of course, the same as noted above (U.S. followed by UK, Canada, Sweden, Australia, and India). But the top cities are London, New York, Sydney, Ashburn, Toronto, and Melbourne. I have no gender data, of course, or age data. But English is the dominant language by far, and it’s not even close: German, French, Chinese, and Spanish round out the top five, but they are all slivers.

And that’s pretty much it: For all the data that Google collects, that’s all it tells me. Maybe if I was an advertiser, I would know more. But I’m not, and I wouldn’t want to know anyway.

I’m going to go stick my head back in the sand. 🙂