Windows Phone market share makes a surprising uptick in NetApplication stats

Respected data analytics company NetApplications have posted their updated stats for May 2014, and it holds an interesting surprise for Windows Phone.

According to NetApplication’s numbers  Windows Phone has made a dramatic jump from 0.83% of web traffic to in April to 2.1% in May.

Now of course it seems unlikely that the Windows Phone installed base has doubled in one month.

I suspect what is going on is that NetApplications may have updated their country-level weighting, which I think has so far disadvantages the OS, which is stronger in some parts of the world than others.

From NetApplications’s FAQ:

What is country level weighting, and why do you do it?

The Net Market Share data is weighted by country. We compare our traffic to the CIA Internet Traffic by Country table, and weight our data accordingly. For example, if our global data shows that Brazil represents 2% of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4% of global Internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice. This is done to balance out our global data. All regions have differing markets, and if our traffic were concentrated in one or more regions, our global data would be inappropriately affected by those regions. Country level weighting removes any bias by region.

Interestingly the improved Windows Phone numbers bring NetApplications in line with Statcounter, which gives Windows Phone 2.4% web usage share.  That number has also been steady over the last few months.

NetApplications Mobile Share – May 2014

Both companies also agree that Windows Phone has overtaken the installed base of Blackberry users, who form 1.88% of web users on Statcounter and 1.14% on NetApplications.

Windows Phone of course remains far off the market share leaders, with iOS taking 48.34% of web traffic (this includes iPads) and Android 41.58%.

We hope to see real and significant improvement in Windows Phone share with the release of a plethora of new devices by a wide range of OEMs in June and July, and look forward to reviewing the numbers then.