We’ve reported a few times on Windows Phone 7′s growth, so with Mango coming, we thought we’d revisit it. Of the mobile operating systems, we still see iOS as the leader with 62% of mobile impressions across the Chitika network, followed by Android at 28%. BlackBerry pulls about 5%, Symbian about 3%, and all other mobile operating systems are under 1% of mobile Internet traffic.

Windows Phone has made some strides since the launch of WP7, but it still has a ways to go before it breaks into the top 3 smartphone operating systems. Mango makes some good strides in that direction, adding things like multitasking and copy-and-paste. To some degree, it can be viewed as Microsoft’s version of iOS 4, which Apple introduced last April.

If Windows Phone 7 is going to succeed, it may be wise to attack the business user who still views an iPhone or Android device as a personal device more closely related to a toy than a business tool. If Microsoft can start stealing BlackBerry users who have resisted switching operating systems, they can become very competitive in an industry they know and love – business.

Given our large sample of partner websites, Chitika Insights decided to take a closer look at this number across all US and Canadian traffic and follow up on this news. What we discovered was that the media had it half right.

While Windows 7 sees enough of a spike on the weekends to surpass Windows XP, Windows XP still sees a strong enough presence in the workplace to hold onto its advantage on the weekdays by a comfortable margin. For a week long sample, Windows XP continues to hold the edge, with 32.145% of the weekly market versus 28.429% for Windows 7.

This should come at no surprise, as Windows XP is still the dominant workplace operating system. While many, including myself, liked our time with XP, one has to hope that this current trend towards Windows 7 adoption continues.

Apparently, people are impressed by Microsoft’s updates, and Microsoft is starting to see the synergy between IE and Bing.  We’ll keep an eye on this and see if IE9 continues to be a boon for Bing, or if it levels off and drops as more people adopt it.

According to Mozilla’s Firefox Download Tracker, as of right now the browser has been downloaded over 25 million times – and despite IE9′s one-week head start, Firefox 4 has passed it in overall browser market share.

I’ve written before that I really like what Microsoft has been doing recently: Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Bing, and now IE9 are all excellent products.  However, in many cases, the market seems to be a bit harder to convince, showing just how long a company’s reputation takes to change.

Hopefully, Microsoft can continue their recent track record of innovating (and personally, I still light a candle for the rumored-then-discontinued Courier tablet).  In the meantime, excellent competition like Firefox and Google’s Chrome browser continue to innovate and improve at a rapid pace, pushing the entire industry towards better quality products.

Curious as to how the new version of Internet Explorer will affect the landscape of online advertising, Chitika Insights took a look at the Click-Through Rates of various versions of the browser using a sample of US and Canadian traffic. While Insights has looked at the tendencies of tech-forward internet users, and the common idea is that early adopters of a new technology are tougher to advertise to, for Internet Explorer 9, this does not seem to be the case early on:

Rather than having a significantly lower CTR than its older counterparts, the ad susceptibility of IE 9 users is relatively similar to those of IE 7 and 8 users. Compared to IE 6, however, it is far lower, and less than half of people who continue to run versions even older than IE 6. As IE 6 users continue to (slowly) convert to later versions of Internet Explorer, it will be interesting to see if they bring their click-happiness with them.

Today, Danny Sullivan got an answer to a fairly important question: does Google use its own toolbar, as it accuses Microsoft of doing with Internet Explorer, to look at searches on other engines, thus “stealing” competitors’ results?  Apparently, although they do use toolbar data in their search algorithms, they don’t use Bing searches as an indicator.

You can read Danny’s full writeup for the deeper details.  Our little contribution to the story is a quick look at just how prevalent the Google toolbar really is.  Of all Google traffic coming through the Chitika ad network, about 4.6% were from Google’s toolbar installed into a web browser.  Naturally, this implies that Google’s installed toolbar user base is much higher than 5%, as no user performs all of his or her searches from a single location.

This does throw the potential for cross-copying into sharp perspective; even if you assume the Google toolbar to be installed on 15% of home computers (a number we’ll try to bring you at some point), it still doesn’t come close to the number of Internet Explorer installations, which seems to be what Google suspects Microsoft is using to observe and capture users’ searches.

For once, in this debate Google doesn’t come across as the 800 pound gorilla.  In some ways, it’s refreshing to see a vision of old-school competition-hating Microsoft; it’s a bit of a throwback to the Internet bubble days.  Going forward, it will be very interesting to see what becomes of this ongoing PR kick-boxing match.

As of Q4 2009, HP was by far and away the biggest home computer company, holding nearly 20% of the market according to Gartner.  If they start aggressively marketing and distributing WebOS, that’s a serious threat to Microsoft Windows.

Looking at our own data, we see that WebOS is currently sending very little traffic – as a purely mobile operating system, it’s outnumbered 47 to 1 by iPhones and 31 to 1 by Android devices (although I should note we see twice as many WebOS devices than Windows Phone 7 ones).

But HP bringing about a new operating system is huge news no matter how you slice it.  I wonder if this is more dangerous to Microsoft, or to the future health of Google’s Chrome OS.

Publishers, how does your site look on WebOS?  Have you had a chance to check, and do you have traffic from WebOS devices?  Combining this upcoming family of devices with the half-laptop half-smartphone nature of the iPad and other tablets means that any web publisher needs to start new research into what works on a bigger variety of devices.

At HP’s event, techmeister Robert Scoble managed to score an interview with HP CTO Phil McKinney.

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The value of an individual user, in this case, is determined by their likelihood to click on a website’s revenue-generating call-to-action – in Chitika’s case, a text ad embedded in the site.  Across the sample of nearly 15 million impressions used for this study, Google users clicked on ads at a rate of 1.09%, while Bing users clicked on ads 1.67% of the time.

“Microsoft absolutely did the right thing by targeting people who buy online,” says Alden DoRosario, Chitika’s co-founder and CTO.  “Bing’s Cashback service did its job, and ensured that people who were using search with a clear intent to buy came to Bing.”

Across the Chitika network, the amount of Web traffic driven by Bing has been increasing steadily throughout 2010 – from 4.4% of traffic generated in April to 6.6% thus far in July – and that growth, combined with the higher per-user value, means that Bing should no longer be an afterthought for SEO gurus and webmasters.

Contact:

Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com

Redmond, WA, the Seattle-area home of Microsoft, boasts arguably the biggest potential threat to Google in the Bing decision engine. Launched in early 2009, Bing has made a lot of noise, and a lot of innovations, aimed at making Microsoft a search leader. To their credit, Redmond has the lowest Google usage rate of the four HQ cities at 78.70%. Unsurprisingly, Bing’s usage in Redmond is higher than in the overall numbers, generating 15.94% of all search traffic coming into the Chitika network.

Cupertino, CA, lays claim to Apple’s headquarters. Apple has been engaged in a well-publicized battle with Google over mobile devices, and rumors have even floated that Apple was considering changing the iPhone’s default search engine to Bing. Cupertino, though, has a higher rate of Google usage than any city on this list except for Google’s own hometown of Mountain View. 89.91% of Cupertino search traffic comes from Google.

Sunnyvale, CA, Yahoo!’s stomping grounds, manages to see Yahoo! usage at about twice the rate of the overall Chitika network, coming in at 9.49%. Google still dominates, though, sending 86.04% of all search traffic. Taking their partnership with Bing into account, “Microhoo” makes up 13.27% of the Sunnyvale market.

Mountain View, CA, Googleville. The land of simplicity and blue links sees a 94.29% market share for the home team, with both Yahoo! and Bing coming in with just over 2.5%.

Overall, across the Chitika network, the breakdown is as follows:

It should be noted that for the purposes of this study, Chitika Research was measuring traffic generated by the various search engines, rather than search queries entered.

Raw Percentages:

Contact:
Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com

Looking at the hourly market share is particularly telling.  Between 5AM and 2PM Central time, Internet Explorer 6 holds fairly steady at about 13% of all Web traffic.  After 2PM, however, the usage of IE6 drops off significantly, mirrored by a rise in the usage of Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft’s latest, Internet Explorer 8.

“It almost looks like individual Internet users are more tech-advanced at home than the IT departments where they work,” says Alden DoRosario, Chitika’s CTO.  “It’s crazy to think that people whose job description revolves around employees having secure ways to browse the Web would keep IE6 alive, while these same employees go home to more secure browsers.”

When broken down on a day-by-day basis, a similar pattern emerges: Monday through Friday, IE6 is the fourth most used browser.  On weekends, it loses almost half of its market share to Firefox and IE8.

About Chitika

Chitika, Inc., is a search-based online advertising network, leading the way in intent-based advertising and search engine insights.  Chitika provides publishers with an innovative way to monetize search engine traffic, and advertisers a new way of generating leads with clear consumer intent.  With over 60,000 sites and 2 billion monthly impressions, the Chitika network is the pulse of the online world.  Through research and targeting, Chitika continually evolves its image as “the ad network that knows when not to show ads.”  For more information, visit http://chitika.com

Contact:

Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com