Posting Date: June 18, 2003

WebWord Comment -- How many web users have Acrobat Reader installed? I can't seem to find any penetration statistics. Macromedia has a page listing Flash and Shockwave penetration and it would be nice to have the same kind of data for Acrobat Reader. Any ideas?

Reader Comments...

Also those with Java turned off or not installed.

Posted by: on June 18, 2003 10:59 PM

US Numbers only are at:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/tech_breakdown.html

Posted by: Boyink on June 19, 2003 08:35 AM

This month's Business 2.0 says 100,000,000 PCs in 2000.

Posted by: Joel Spolsky on June 20, 2003 12:06 AM

Howdy, stats here are, as always, tricky... notes:

-- The NPD/MediaMetrix studies that Macromedia commissions and publishes are based on NPD's regular consumer focus groups, which may or may not match a particular business audience, educational audience, or other audience. It's a good indicator of relative trends, but I'd hesitate to use it for any type of absolute predictions.

-- Versioning is important. The NPD audits have specific tests for Flash and Shockwave versions, but running versioning tests on Acrobat and the rest of the major plugins would increase the risk of incomplete tests from audited consumers. We do know that the smaller Flash Player has a much faster adoption rate than the larger Shockwave Player, which ties in with the intuitive observation that more people update things more quickly if it's a small fast download, but I have no idea how many of the 76% of consumers who could view *some* Acrobat content were using a recent version of that plugin.

-- Some numbers cited in the press are the number of copies of a plugin distributed, or the number of initial requests they get on their website. Such quotes need to be controlled for: aborted downloads; unsucessful installations; updates to existing installations; installation to multiple browsers on one machine; one owner with multiple machines; installers included with other software and never used on their own. (ie, the number of copies distributed does not directly indicate the percentage of web viewers who can immediately view such content.)

For Adobe Acrobat, we know that most consumers can view at least some PDF files, but I don't know how many have updated their versions for newer files, sorry.

Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support

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Posted by: John Dowdell on June 24, 2003 08:03 PM

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