First off, here's the visit breakdown:
Firefox: 58.75%
IE: 26.11%
Chrome: 6.46%
Opera: 3.95%
Safari: 3.63%
Mozilla: 0.67%
Now here's the average revenue generated per 1,000 visits for each browser. Calculated for example as Safari_revenue * 1000 / Safari_visits:
Safari: $2.392
Firefox: $1.599
Mozilla: $1.476
Chrome: $1.053
IE: $1.050
Opera: $0.388
This sort of went against some of my assumptions. I imagined that IE would be the top revenue generator, as you sort of imagine IE users as being less tech savvy, more 'used to' clicking on adverts etc.
The other interesting point to note is that you should never believe the extremely vocal minority who tell you that all firefox users have AdBlockPlus installed. They don't. As you can see Firefox users are the 2nd best revenue generators.
I didn't know where to place safari before I did the calculations, but it does make some sense. Apple users are more used to spending money, (They likely value their time more than their money), so perhaps this is why they generate more revenue.
The shocker was Opera. An Opera user generates just 16% of an average Safari user! That's really poor. Someone mentioned something about built in content blocking in Opera, but I couldn't find it in a default install.
So should I start pushing people away from Opera, and toward firefox+safari? Well, no, they're probably more likely using the browser *because* of their advertising behavior, not the other way around.... Still, food for thought.
So what about OSes?
Macintosh: $2.156
Linux: $2.076
Windows: $1.285
So once again, we have Mac users ready to spend money, click on ads, etc. The surprise is that Linux users generate quite a bit more revenue than Windows users. Counter to what I had assumed previously.
Note that these stats exclude iphone/ipod/opera mobile which aren't really big enough to draw many conclusions from - also people don't click often on ads on mobiles.
The stats were generated using Google analytics tied to adsense, which works really well for things like this.
In summary then:
- Apple users are good at generating revenue - they buy stuff
- Linux and firefox users are also good - don't listen to the overly vocal AdBlockPlus user that likes to tell you how everyone using firefox doesn't see any ads anyway
- IE/windows is solid enough
- Opera is terrible
- Google analytics rocks
If you have any thoughts on why Opera should be so bad, please post a comment, perhaps it's to do with the 'turbo mode'? afaik this puts everything through their opera-mini web proxies? so perhaps that blocks ads?
Update:
As mentioned by some commenters, this may have more to do with different locations than browsers, coupled to the fact that some browsers have definite geographical biases. For example, Opera usage in these stats for the US, is 2%, whilst Opera usage for eastern Europe is 8%. In short, Opera may have a geographical bias toward less-easily-monetized countries (At least using adsense).
