Putting things in perspective: Measuring Flash Player penetration.

Posted by Serge Jespers on Mar 23, 2009 in Flash Player, Industry | 3 comments

Last week, when the news broke about the number of downloads “that other browser plugin” got, it got me thinking… What does that number really mean in terms of impact?. Can you really use download numbers as a way to measure how successful a technology is? The answer is “no” and the reason is very simple: A download still doesn’t mean that the user installed it.

So how does Adobe measure the impact of the Flash Player? A few months back, Emmy Huang (product manager for Flash Player) wrote a comprehensive blog post about it. Emmy wrote:

It’s interesting to note that for Adobe, the number that is quoted is an “install” and not a “download” number. [...] We have an internal dashboard application to track the general “health” of Flash Player downloads and installs, and it can chart the data daily, weekly, monthly, etc. It uses XML feeds of our server log data from Akamai, our current CDN. The dashboard is useful in helping us 1) to understand our traffic so we can try to optimize things like install success rate, and catch problems with our installers or CDN delivery in a matter of days, and 2) get a sense of where our penetration might be in the penetration study in the next wave. The penetration study is only run once a quarter, and it’s hard to wait three months to know where we’re at. [...]

For “Player downloads” we count the attempted and successful downloads for all the player installers we post to the CDN (based on the related HTTP status codes), such as “swflash.cab” and “install_flash_player.exe” (note these numbers aren’t unique.) We also count the number of installs, which is the sum of requests for a small text file that a newly installed player requests the first time it is launched in the browser. That number is used as an estimate – we’ve had releases where the text file request wasn’t implemented or working on certain platforms, and since it is only requested once there are a number of reasons why it might not make it all the way to the server. [...]

As with any statistics, you should understand the methodology behind the numbers. But the good thing about that number is it is something you or another third party like Forrester, can independently test or verify — which makes it the more interesting and important number for Flash Player.