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Comment by tikhon | Hacker News Reader

Bram Cohen's comment on this story: "The really misleading spin is the claim that mobile is taking over computers. The actual numbers in that report indicated that smart mobile has basically killed off dumb mobile, but only had a modest negative impact on regular computers."

source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ui7ak5pz6wi8c5o/bram%20cohen%20on%... also hat tip to falon for finding this story -- i don't know her HN username

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Well for the one top ten web site that has open web logs, mobile traffic does seem to be taking off at the expense of desktops - http://www.vartmp.com/blog/2013/04/16

This is a percentage chart, which only shows that mobile traffic is eating into desktops' _share_ of the total traffic.

This chart says nothing about whether mobile is eating into the absolute traffic that desktops are getting. More likely mobile traffic is increasing a lot, and desktop is holding steady.

Correct. A cursory glance at the data used for that graph http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports shows that desktop traffic has actually increased significantly in that time period (+ 25ish% for both windows and mac). For example:

Feb 2012: http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-02/Squ...

Feb 2013: http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2013-02/Squ...

FWIW, I have first party analytics data on a top 50 online site and this was the trend we saw too. Can't remember if there were any meaningful trends in time spent though (meaning, if desktop was losing to mobile on a time spent basis).

Wikipedia might be a weird source to get that data, since people are more likely to "quickly check wikipedia" on their phone instead of a computer, while most sites people just browse may be uneffected.

More data needed.

Conversely some people might be more likely to do in-depth research into a subject on wikipedia on a desktop than ever on a mobile phone.

Agree on the more data needed.

smart mobile has basically killed off dumb mobile, but only had a modest negative impact on regular computers

I find that fascinating and have not heard it stated so clearly before. Is it true? Has anyone else been making this point?

The Asymco chart that the Mary Meeker report uses shows that smart mobile is in fact tearing it up in terms of market share.

It can also be technically correct that the "negative" impact on desktop is "small" if you take "negative" to mean "shrinking revenue" instead of "shrinking market share" and you factor in doubts about Windows 8 to account for some stagnation in desktop/laptop PCs.

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