Image via StatCounter's 'Internet Wars' report
Independent web analytics company StatCounter keeps a close on eye on the intense competition between tech giants vying for control over key parts of the digital landscape and its latest report details the winners and losers as of June 2013.
The StatCounter Internet Wars Report – Winners and Losers uses data from more than 15bn page views per month to the StatCounter network of more than 3m websites worldwide. The report tracked the progress of companies like Apple, Samsung, Google, Facebook and Microsoft over the 12-month period between July 2012 and June 2013 in areas such as browsing, search, referral traffic and internet usage.
As of June 2013, Samsung overtook Apple as the world’s No 1 in terms of mobile internet usage. A year ago, Nokia was at the top, but now we see Samsung’s 25.47pc market share giving it the slightest edge over Apple’s 25.09pc, while Nokia drops to third with 21.96pc.
Non-mobile internet usage still dominates, though, at 83.92pc. In terms of web browsers, Chrome became the world’s first choice back in May 2012, and it has now overtaken Internet Explorer in the US for the first time. Chrome how holds 34.01pc of the US market, up from 23.84pc year-on-year, while IE declined from 40.89pc to 32.46pc in the same period.
Microsoft is also struggling to get a significant chunk of its users to move on from Windows XP. The almost-12-year-old operating system is still Microsoft’s second most popular OS, and Windows 7 is also seeing increased internet usage despite the launch of Windows 8 midway through the review period.
Facebook remains the biggest referrer of traffic from social media on a global scale and this has increased from 61.5pc 12 months ago to 71.03pc in June 2013. While Twitter ranks fifth in the US, it’s the No 2 in the UK where it appears to have a more avid following.
Unsurprisingly, Google is still the dominant search engine, with more than 90pc of worldwide referral share in June 2013, but Bing is making gains in the US, rising to 11.69pc.
