30% of Web Surfers Have Flash Player 6
According to the latest Flash Player Version Penetration page over at Macromedia, between 30 and 37 percent of web surfers can view Flash Player 6 content. Fueled in part by sales of Windows XP, which bundled the Flash 6 player, adoption rates rocketed from virtually zero in March to almost a third of all web users. At this rate, Flash developers could comfortably begin developing Flash 6 content for clients six months from now (that is, if you wanted to launch a site when the adoption rate reaches at least 90%).
Note the word clients. Experimenting with Flash 6 on personal web sites is one thing, but right now nobody should be deploying Flash 6 content for the unwashed AOL web surfing masses. At least not yet.
Comments
Just some background on this situation...
I've been studying how long Flash takes to penetrate the mainstream for a couple of years now and here is what I've found:
First of all, I've been using 86% as an 'acceptable penetration rate' because that is when the bell curve of adoption starts to plateau. Once, you're at 86%, you're really only talking about controlled office environments and otherwise locked-down computers which haven't upgraded yet.
So here is what has happened with previous versions --
Flash 4 took 18 months to get up to 86%.
Flash 5 took 15 months to get up to 86%.
Flash 6 was released in March of 2002, so given a worst case scenario, we are looking at June of 2003 (15 months) to reach critical mass. There are many factors, however, which should shrink the 15-month window in this case:
1. Flash 6 is already at 30%, three months after its release. Flash 5 was in the low 20s during the same time period.
2. Flash 6 is a lot more of a "user's" release as opposed to a "developer's" release, meaning, there are a lot of features in Flash 6 which would cause users to want to download it. Flash 5 was more of an improvement to the way developers could use the program. There weren't a whole lot of new features in Flash 5 (i.e. video, two-way communication, etc) that users could even notice.
3. It's more of an IE/PC world now then ever, and with the automatic ActiveX download of Flash, users will find themselves downloading Flash 6 without barely even knowing it.
4. A lot more companies are pushing the envelope and using complex Flash applications on their sites these days.
Soooooo, given all of these factors, my prediction for when Flash 6 will reach 86% is 11 months from when it was released (give or take a month). That puts us at about February of 2003.
Posted by: Mike Davidson at July 25, 2002 1:27 PM
