April 23, 2002

NPD new media study for March 2002

Macromedia has just published the March 2002 numbers for Shockwave and Flash plugin penetration. These should be useful for pitching and planning projects that employ these technologies. The study also provides additional technographic information.

The high level view is that Flash content can now be said to be accessible by 98% of the general audience, and Shockwave (for Director) content accessible by 70% of that same audience.

Keep in mind that that 98% Flash-capable audience include versions starting at Flash 2. Projects planned to support Flash 5-specific features reach 90%, and Flash MX-based projects currently reach just over 3% of that audience (Flash MX/6 was released half-way through the month of study).

Similarly, for the Shockwave-capable audience, the 70% number represents all versions of Shockwave starting with SW6, with 36% of the audience capable of viewing Shockwave 3D content with SW8.5.

Macromedia's published findings from the study also shows some interesting technographic information for US users, including OS, browser platform, connection type and location, length of experience with the web and age of computer used.

For instance, the majority numbers look like the following (percentages reflect entire data set):

-Top computing platform: Win '98 (39%)
-Top Win browser: IE 6.x (35%)
-Top Mac browser: IE 5.x (1.6%)
-Top Connection method: 56k modem (39.9%)
(??Note the good showing of DSL/Cable modem users accounting for 30.8%)
-Top connection location: Home (68.5%)
-Tops in experience on the web: 5 or more years (57.4%)
-Tops in age of computer: Older than 2 years (35.7%)
(??Note the good showing of 1 to 2 year old computers coming in at 31.5%)

You can check the methodology employed by NPD, an example of their survey, and finally, here's a chart of the rich media technologies surveyed.


Sadly, the non-Macromedia techs are undifferentiated by version.

Posted by Lewis Francis at April 23, 2002 12:01 AM
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