The bad news: Macs, once forming a disproportionately large percentage of the online community, now account for only a little over 3% of the computers surfing the 'net. The good news: that's actually up a little bit compared to six months ago. So, three percent and gaining fast! Well, okay, make that "gaining slowly"; the ZDNet AnchorDesk article touting the numbers calls Apple's increase a "very modest rise." Still, it's a positive change, right?

But let's take a closer look at these numbers for a second. They come from some outfit called StatMarket, a division of "WebSideStory" (ugh), who claims to give "accurate Internet statistics and user trends in real time." What they don't claim is to be unbiased, and it's a darn good thing, given the top story on their home page: "Windows 98 Usage At All-Time High, Especially Among Home Users." This little article breaks the stunning news that use of Windows 98 has "nearly doubled in use" over the past year. Well, duh. Go to any computer superstore and try to buy a non-Mac consumer system without Windows 98. You'd have better luck buying bondage gear in Crate And Barrel. The Register has an interesting take on this very article in its story on "momentum marketing," hinting that Microsoft might be a "significant customer" of WebSideStory-- but of course, that's just a guess.

Now, here's the thing about WebSideStory's usage statistics: they're based solely on visits to web sites using something called "HitBox," which is a real-time traffic analysis system. If the site isn't using HitBox, visits to it don't count towards those stats. (Suppose Microsoft's site is a HitBox customer?) Less than a year ago, HitBox was a Windows-only service, meaning not many Mac-oriented webmasters were likely to use it. These days it appears to be platform-independent, but unless you want a big HitBox ad on every page of your site, you've got to pay for the service, and unless you're a big company overflowing with cash, it ain't exactly cheap. Suffice to say, AtAT won't be signing up anytime soon.

But what about Apple? We know Apple's got cash, and we know Apple.com's got traffic; wouldn't it be interesting to see what happens to those stats if Apple paid to put its web site on HitBox? The daily sample of page views listed by HitBox is about 43 million; recently Apple logged 961,000 "unique visitors" in a week. Even if each of those visitors only looked at, say, three pages (almost certainly a low estimate), by our count, Apple's traffic would account for about 1% of the whole pool. Assuming a fairly Mac-heavy mix of visitors to Apple's site, we think Apple could make those numbers dance. By our estimates, a "Pro" account with Apple's level of traffic would cost something like $8000 a month. Isn't that a small price to pay for the ensuing news articles showing Mac Internet usage doubling in a month, or whatever?

And for those of you who don't tune in every single day and memorize every little plot twist on our show, we'd like to point out that in April of last year, WebSideStory reported that only 2.68% of web surfers were using Macs. So by their own biased statistics, the percentage of Macs in use on the 'net has increased over 17% in less than a year. How's that for a silver lining?