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January 29, 2005
Why Apple's website gets so much traffic: because it's so damn good.
This just in from InternetRetailer.com:
Apple still leads in visits to computer hardware sites
Apple Computer Inc. maintained its lead in the number of unique visitors to computer hardware e-commerce sites for December, with 21.71 million visitors, 24% more than the 17.54 million visitors to second-ranked Dell Inc., Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. reports.
Hewlett Packard Co. came in third in December, with 12.22 million visitors, followed by Sun Microsystems Inc., 4.16 million; IBM Corp., 2.6 million; Gateway Inc., 2.41 million; Seiko Epson Corp., 1.44 million; XM Satellite Radio, 1.42 million; palmOne Inc., 1.42 million; and PlayStation.com, 1.37 million.
Nielsen/NetRatings reports that Apple also led in the average amount of time per visit, with 31 minutes, 5 seconds
Now, you may ask, why does Apple, which has a mere 5% of the computer market, get more traffic to its website than all those other huge computer companies? Because of people like me, who use Apple computers and find that Apple's website is actually interesting and useful enough to visit often.
- Visual design — Apple's site is a beauty, a real achievement in modern web design. It beautifully reinforces Apple's striking industrial product design, and sets high standards for corporate marketing and retail websites. Their pages look great — pleasing to the eye, and easy to digest the information on. Check out their Cinema Displays or iMac G5 or iMovie pages, or their online store.
- Useful community tech support — the Apple discussion boards are very low in noise and high in answers. I've usually gotten the answer to a question of mine within a day of posting. And that responsiveness has encouraged me to browse through the boards and answer questions that others have asked. The high quality of postings there makes it the single best source of answers for your Mac-related questions.
- Instant Mac zeitgeist — When you visit their homepage, you can instantly grasp the zeitgeist of Apple's marketing machine. If you are at all a Mac geek, as I am, then this is just good fun gossip. What's Apple all about right now? Just go to their home page. Apple's new hardware and software releases have come to be watched with great interest by Mac fans: rumors fly for months across the internet, and every so often, at the big Mac events — like Macworld Expo San Francisco every January, Macworld Expo Paris and Tokyo, the World Wide Developer Conference in June — Apple release new stuff and everyone goes wild. People rush online to order the thing, and post their feelings about it on websites, blogs, forums, wherever.
It's all quite interesting. I say all this from experience, because I am a total Mac geek, and I know I'm not alone. I have several friends just in my neighborhood who are all similarly configured and obsessive about Macs. We all have Powerbooks, 23“ Cinema Displays, huge digital music libraries on external Firewire hard drives, and regularly read the Mac-fanatic sites like MacSurfer, Macintouch, and Daring Fireball. I guess it's kind of like guys watching sports or tinkering with cars, except we watch what Apple does, remember every detail of every piece of Apple hardware, tweak our computer setups, learn all this software, and create things with our Macs.
And we wouldn't have it any other way.
January 29, 2005 in Macintosh OS X, Web Sites + Graphic Design | Permalink
Comments
There's one important part of the equation. PC users have thousands of sites to go to for their hardhard/software. Mac users really only have one place to go and that's Apple. Need a new Mac...go to Apple. Need a new PC, well, where do you start? Who do you trust? What's available? Which processor? This coupled with the "cult of Mac" that you described in your post and it just makes sense that Apple.com would genrate more traffic than Dell even with a much lower user base.
Posted by: Clay | May 13, 2007 8:14:42 AM
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