Last week, market research firm Nielsen/NetRatings issued a press release claiming that Google Docs and Spreadsheets dominate web-based productivity tools since October, with a market share of 92 percent of unique visitors. I must say that I love Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and I am sure that it's a very popular service, but somehow, I am having a hard time believing that EditGrid, Num Sum, ThinkFree, WriteBoard, and Zohoâ€"all of them included in Nielsen/NetRatings' researchâ€"would together only account to a meager 8 percent. So I decided to do my own research, and came up with some interesting conclusions.
To conduct my investigation, I focused on the two players that I am most familiar with: ThinkFree and Zoho. I asked them how many unique visitors they got in October, 2006, and here are the answers I got: ThinkFree got just under 100,000, and Zoho 123,649. So let's call it 220,000 together, and let's assume for a minute that EditGrid, Numsum.com, and WriteBoard got none during this lonely month of October. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Google got 445,762, which is just over twice as many as what ThinkFree and Zoho got together. If you believe these numbers, Google's market share in terms of unique visitors is only 70 percent, not 92 percent. Now, if we assume that ThinkFree and Zoho captured only half of the market share not already captured by Google, and leave the rest to ajaxWrite, ajaxXLS, EditGrid, gOFFICE Spreadsheets, gOFFICE Word Processing, iNetWord, iRows, Num Sum, RallyPoint, Sheester, Virtual Ubiquity, wikiCalc, Writeboard, Writer, and Xcellery, Google's market share in terms of unique visitors is closer to 50 percent.
Now, that was back in October, and things have changed a bit since then. In November, Google Docs and Spreadsheets attracted only 424,785 unique visitors, a 5 percent drop from October, while both ThinkFree and Zoho kept adding more users. As of today, Zoho is at about 190,000 unique visitors a month, on track to get beyond 200,000 in March. For it's part, ThinkFree recently passed the bar of 250,000 registered users, as announced in this other press release. Google's most recent numbers have not been published, but December brought 432,156 unique visitors, a 3 percent drop from October. At best, Google's market share today should be around 50 percent. Not bad at all, but a far cry from the 92 percent claimed by Nielsen/NetRatings.
What I get from all this is that Google Docs and Spreadsheets might very well be the leader in the Office 2.0 space, but there still is a lot of room for others to play, and it is actually quite amazing that companies like ThinkFree and Zoho, with their ridiculously small marketing budgets, can play in the same league as mighty Google. Office 2.0 still is in its infancy, users are bleeding edge pioneers, and to them, nothing matters more than innovation. This is precisely where start-ups still have a decent shot at making a difference, and Google cannot be considered as one anymore.
When questioned, Nielsen/NetRatings provided the following answer:
Basically, the difference between your numbers and ours comes down to a basic panel measurement vs. cookie measurement difference. We use a panel to measure an audience sample and then project the numbers, while Google Analytics uses cookies to track visitors. Unique Visitor counts via panel-based measurement will almost always be less for the following reasons:
- Cookie Deletion - Every time a user deletes cookies, and Google Analytics serves them another cookie, they will be counted as a new user.
- US vs. World - Many times, cookies count traffic regardless of physical location. Our panel used for this study is US only.
- Household vs Individual - The Megapanel measures members in a household as 1 visitor, and also considers a shared work PC environment.
Since all the providers in our study were measured in the same way, it's an apples to apples comparison. Hope this helps!
Suzy Bausch
Media Relations
NetRatings, Inc.
To me, it does not make much sense, and essentially tells us that their panel methodology is fundamentally broken. This is something that the industry ought to fix if we are to put any credit in these kind of research. The Alexa rankings I am using for the Weekly Office 2.0 Roundups are not much better by the way...
Disclaimer: I serve as an advisor for ThinkFree and Zoho.
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