Firefox Usage – Does the Day of Week Have an Effect?

Ken Kovash

6 responses

We know that internet usage (as well as Firefox usage) sees a good deal of fluctuation based on seasonality. We’ve also historically noticed that the day of the week affects usage of the internet (or number of people using the internet, depending on your definition of usage).

Thinking about this latter trend, I decided to quantify this “day of week” effect. Applying regression analysis to some numbers that give us a rough idea of daily active Fx users, I’m able to account for a few factors, including the month of the year and US holidays (“controlling for all observable variables” in statistical speak). Here’s what I found:

day_changes

If there are any stats fans reading, please let me know. I’m happy to go into further detail regarding my regression model, the regression coefficients, t-stats, etc. For everyone else, there’s an easy way to intrepret these findings. Guessing the number of daily active internet users on Fridays as 400 million, we can estimate the day-to-day change in internet usage during a typical week:

internet_pop

I wonder if comScore, Nielsen and other measurement firms see similar usage patterns…

6 responses

  1. Seamus wrote on :

    I have seen a very similar trend for websites I manage. It falls, really falls, every weekend and it spikes high on Monday.

  2. Mike Beltzner wrote on :

    I wonder if we should be interpreting Monday – Saturday = Core Geek/Nerd Audience for Firefox? 🙂

    Is there any way to further slice within days for “at work hours” and “at home hours” (adjusted for locale, I guess?) I can see how that might be more difficult.

    What’s the best way to draw inferences from this data and then test them further?

  3. kkovash wrote on :

    Mike,

    Thanks for the questions. We should eventually have the ability to drill down into the data as you suggest… unfortunately, we don’t quite have the internal resources to do that slicing.

    In terms of drawing inferences from this data, the analysis was actually intended to simply help with some forthcoming funnelcake findings… I just thought it was somewhat interesting as a standalone topic.

    Ken

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    […] Firefox usage? A few months ago, we provided some initial analysis about how Firefox usage varies by day of the week (e.g., Wednesday vs. Saturday). We’ve since attempted to improve upon that analysis by making […]

  6. Ben wrote on :

    Excellent info.

    I agree with the others. I have noticed the weekend is always much slower in terms of traffic and Ad revenue. The weekdays are more popular for sure, and it does start to decline for me on Fridays as well. Saturdays are almost always the worst.

    I was googling that to see if I could find data to support my suspicions, and sure enough, I found this post.

    Thanks!