Apple's public beta version of its upcoming OS X Yosemite desktop operating system has tripled its traffic in comparison to the work-in-progress release of the earlier OS X Mavericks.
Ad network Chitika sampled "hundreds of millions" of OS X users across North America and tracked impressions on online advertisements to measure web traffic running through the OS X website. The findings show that Yosemite has gained as much as 0.15% of the web traffic and, although this seems like an insignificant figure, has earned three times more traffic as Mavericks when it was released as a public beta last year.
Chitika's numbers show the traffic hovered between 0.2% and 0.3% on July 24, the day the operating system was released. However, Yosemite saw a rapid significant increase the following day as the traffic jumped to over 0.7% and slipped a little over 0.6% on the third day. On the fourth day following its release, Yosemite accounted for 0.15% of all web traffic to the OS X website, representing 15 out of every 1,000 Mac users. In comparison, Mavericks was only able to earn 0.05% of all web traffic 30 days after its public beta release.
"The increased level of aggregate activity for Yosemite is likely partially driven by the prominent changes present in this OS version fueling a higher degree of developer curiosity and experimentation," explains Chitika. "The changes to Safari in particular may be prompting a greater amount of Web usage from current users in terms of testing and customization."
But Chitika also believes that Yosemite's traffic share is not likely to grow beyond what it has already accumulated, given Apple's self-imposed limit on redemption codes for customers who want to try out the new OS before it officially goes live. The ad network, however, points out that the numbers point to a promising future for Yosemite.
To put this in perspective, let's take a look at the traffic figures for Microsoft's beta version of Windows 8 in 2011. Although dubbed Windows 8 Developer Preview, the preview version was actually made available to anyone who wished to try it out. Four days after the release, the Windows 8 beta maxed out at 0.035% of overall traffic to the Windows website, representing 35 out of 100,000 users.
It is worth noting that comparisons such as these are, at best, speculative, since Windows powers approximately 1.5 billion computers all over the world while OS X accounts for around 80 million. This gives OS X a 19:1 advantage, meaning it takes 19 times more Windows users to use a specific edition to reach the same share as an OS X preview.
