Google Earth usage stats?

Hitwise web analyst Bill Tancer has posted a league table for portals and how their respective properties rank. In search, for example, Google is first with 47.4% of all visits, followed by Yahoo! (16.0%) and MSN (11.5%).

Hitwise also has a “Travel – Maps” category, where Bill lists the following sites, ranked by visits as a percentage of the total segment:

  1. Mapquest (56.3%)
  2. Yahoo! Maps (20.5%)
  3. Google Maps (7.5%)
  4. MSN Virtual Earth (4.3%)
  5. Google Earth (2.0%)

So, Google Earth users are like the Mac users of maps:-) Actually, I’m wondering how Hitwise measures that metric for Google Earth. Unless Google provides Hitwise with logon data, I don’t see how they can tell accurately how many people use Google Earth. Or does it mean that at any one time, 2% of map and travel site visitors are downloading the standalone Google Earth application from http://earth.google.com? That’d be quite a feat — the site doesn’t serve for much else. (I’m trying to find out.)

2 thoughts on “Google Earth usage stats?”

  1. I’ll be interested to see what you find out Stefan. I think you’re right and it’s measuring visits to the earth.google.com site or something. Which would under-report actual use by a large margin.

    I think this Google Trends data is more representative.

  2. It might be based on referrer urls, which GEarth might not provide. Rather than venturing any further guesses, it might be worth getting some hard facts on how this data comes about.

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