It occurs like clockwork, across the first of every month. Websites that concentrate on expertise churn out practically an identical articles, all based mostly on a chart like this one, ready by the great people at Statcounter Global Stats.
You are going to see that chart lots this week, embedded in posts that embrace detailed explanations of what the writer thinks the underlying knowledge factors imply. Generally they even persuade an business analyst to share their ideas. It is stereotypical horserace protection.
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Each month, tech bloggers attempt to flip a chart like this one right into a story, however most of them miss what’s truly occurring.
Statcounter GS
This month, everybody can be trying to elucidate why Home windows 10 (the purple line on the prime) is all of the sudden collapsing in recognition and why Home windows 11 (the blue line within the center) has regained its mojo.
Once I checked Google Information early this morning, these tales have been already up, and I am certain extra are on the best way.
At first of each month, tales like these seem, all based mostly on the identical charts.
Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
My favourite quote from this batch is from Forbes, which made this bold assertion: “The January stats are actually out, and in accordance with Statcounter, the Home windows 11 improve pattern has now un-reversed itself … some 40 million hold-outs have all of the sudden upgraded their PCs within the final 31 days.”
Inevitably, these posts attempt to reply the query, “Why did this occur?” However possibly a greater query is, “Did this occur?” adopted by “Are you certain?” and “Why does not any of this knowledge make sense?”
As a result of here is the fact: Statcounter’s “market share” experiences are an awesome excuse for tech bloggers to crank out a narrative every month, however they bear solely essentially the most informal relation to the true world, and most of these month-to-month spikes are merely statistical noise.
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Let me present you what I imply with one other chart, which I created utilizing knowledge I downloaded from Statcounter’s web site. For this one, I modified the parameters to incorporate knowledge from January 2022 via January 2025, overlaying solely the USA. After plugging that knowledge into Excel, I created a line chart like those they publish, however I made two modifications. First, I added third-order polynomial trendlines for the Home windows 10 and Home windows 11 knowledge factors to indicate the overall route of these month-to-month figures over time. Then, I added a shadow on both facet of that trendline to point a possible margin of error.
Including a trendline helps to clean out the statistical fluctuations and divulges the true patterns on this knowledge.
Chart by Ed Bott/ZDNET; knowledge from Statcounter GS
Effectively, that tells a really totally different story, does not it?
On the websites that use Statcounter’s internet analytics service, pageviews from PCs operating Home windows 10 are steadily declining, whereas pageviews from PCs operating Home windows 11 are steadily growing. And people developments have been constant over time, regardless of some fluctuations within the knowledge.
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You may discover that description does not point out “market share.” Statcounter’s knowledge counts pageviews, not visits, or periods, or particular person gadgets.
And make no mistake about it, these month-to-month fluctuations actually are simply noise. Take a look at the teal-colored line for Home windows 8.x variations from January 2024. Do you actually suppose that 10 or 20 million folks fired up their previous Home windows 8 gadgets on New 12 months’s Day, used them for a number of weeks, after which put all of them again within the closet? That is unlikely.
None of these different month-to-month spikes imply something both. Did thousands and thousands of individuals uninstall Home windows 11 in December 2024 after which change their thoughts a month later? In fact not. The info is simply messy!
Now, let me be crystal clear right here: I do not blame the Statcounter people for profiting from an irresistible alternative to generate publicity. I do, nevertheless, need to have a critical speak with each journalist and analyst who depends on Statcounter’s charts with out questioning the underlying knowledge behind them, as a result of these numbers cannot stand as much as even the mildest questioning.
Who’s Statcounter?
Statcounter is an online analytics firm based mostly in Eire. It was based in 1999, in the course of the Internet 1.0 period, with a easy enterprise mannequin of counting “hits” to web sites utilizing a monitoring pixel that purchasers embedded on their pages. When you’re an internet site proprietor, including Statcounter’s monitoring expertise to your web site may give you worthwhile details about your guests.
It was a superb enterprise for a very long time, however through the years the corporate’s buyer base has shrunk. In 2009, it boasted that 3 million prospects have been utilizing its service. By 2022, its personal pages acknowledged that the shopper base had been lower in half, to 1.5 million web sites.
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W3Techs, which tracks firms on this house, reported that 0.9% of all web sites have been utilizing Statcounter’s providers in 2019. By January 2024, that quantity had shrunk to 0.5%, and once I checked once more in January 2025, the quantity was down once more, to 0.4%.
None of that decline needs to be shocking. Google Analytics dominates this house at the moment, and different huge gamers, like Meta Pixel, WordPress Jetpack, and Adobe Analytics, have additionally stolen share from tiny corporations like Statcounter.
The place do Statcounter’s numbers come from?
Statcounter’s buyer base consists of lots of small web sites and some medium-sized ones. The Statcounter World Stats experiences mixture all of the pageviews from these websites, with particulars concerning the guests, together with the {hardware} kind, working system, and browser, as collected by that monitoring.
Statcounter’s knowledge assortment has declined dramatically within the final decade. A decade in the past, the company’s FAQ page reported that it measured greater than 17 billion pageviews in a typical month. By 2022 (the final numbers that Statcounter has supplied on the current FAQ page), that quantity was down to five billion a month.
Statcounter represents a tiny sliver of precise visitors on the internet, largely from pretty esoteric web sites which have chosen to embed the Statcounter monitoring code on their web sites, like Futbin.com, Filmyzilla.com.fj, Ask.com, and Kernel.org. They cannot depend visitors from the preferred websites on the internet, like Google, Fb, or Wikipedia.
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It is like making an attempt to do a survey of client conduct with out together with Costco, Walmart, Dwelling Depot, Goal, CVS, or any Kroger grocery retailer. By leaving out these giants, your pattern turns into quirky and nearly definitely not consultant of the larger market.
Extra importantly, Statcounter measures solely pageviews, not visits or periods. If I am going to a web site that makes use of the Statcounter service and go to 5 pages on my Home windows 11 PC, and also you load 10 pages together with your Home windows 10 PC, the leads to Statcounter’s “market share” report will present that Home windows 10 is twice as fashionable as Home windows 11. You see the issue right here, I presume.
In fact, that assumes all these pageviews are even counted. On my Home windows 11 PC, the place I exploit Microsoft Edge with its monitoring safety set to Strict, Statcounter’s monitoring code is robotically blocked. Oops.
So, what’s the true story?
The info from Statcounter tells a superbly legitimate story about how folks use web sites that belong to its prospects. However it says nothing concerning the “market share” for Home windows PCs.
It does present, in essentially the most common phrases, that visitors to these websites from Home windows 10 PCs is declining slowly and that visitors from PCs operating Home windows 11 seems to be growing slowly as properly. Do these numbers map to the inhabitants of PCs worldwide? In all probability not, though nobody can say for certain.
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We do know that there are a really massive variety of PCs operating Home windows 10 that aren’t eligible to improve to Home windows 11. That quantity will most likely nonetheless be very massive in October 2025, when help for Home windows 10 ends. Somebody with entry to Microsoft’s telemetry servers may most likely provide you with a reasonably good estimate of what number of gadgets are in every inhabitants, however they don’t seem to be speaking.
The remainder of us, sadly, are left to guess. And if you wish to make a wager based mostly on knowledge from Statcounter, go proper forward. Simply do not put any critical cash on that wager.
