Some interesting statistics were released this week from New Relic and Statcounter. Both are companies well-respected in online data collecting and reporting in their respective fields. While the studies were separate from one another, when considered together, they make for interesting reading.
=== Wait, Who's New Relic and What's a Statcounter?
New Relic is a web application performance management company that monitors 38 billion transactions daily for some of the biggest clientele on the Web. If you recognized names like Nike, Groupon and Zynga, then you'll be interested to know that all of them have New Relic in common. For this study, NR focused on 21,000 Web applications for their findings.
Statcounter, meanwhile, is the most-often referenced statistics collection service on the Internet and is considered the standard go-to information source in the browsing industry. When someone at Google, Mozilla, or Apple points to Web usage statistics, they are most likely doing so by referencing Statcounter.
=== Google is Fast, but PayPal is Popular
The information from New Relic shows two facts that are sure to get online businesses interested. First, PayPal is the most-used payment gateway by a very large margin. 60% of Web transactions happen through PayPal. Its nearest competitor is Authorize.net, which has about 1/3 as many transactions.
Google's Checkout comes in at fifth on the list of payment gateways by volume of transactions, but comes out first in another important metric: speed. Google's Checkout is the fastest payment processor of the bunch. It's average payment processing time was 0.26 seconds - light speeds faster than PayPal's average of just under 1.5 seconds.
So while PayPal still dominates the online payment processing arena, Google's Checkout can lay claim to being the fastest, which may give it a leg up in gaining ground on the competition.
=== Google Wins With Chrome
Google scored another win with Statcounter's latest data release, which shows Google's Chrome browser overtaking and passing Internet Explorer as the most-used browser on the Web. The lead so far is tenuous, but given the growth numbers, it's likely to hold.
Mozilla's Firefox came in third and Opera came in a distant fourth. In mobile browsing, Google's Android Robot browser overtook Opera a few months ago, becoming the most-used mobile browser. That's double win for Google.
=== So What Does This Mean?
Taken together, we see that Google is working to dominate the Internet. Those who do business online will want to look at Google's Checkout for consideration as a secondary gateway to PayPal and designers and website owners will want to remember that Chrome is the most likely browser to be hitting their sites and consider optimizing for that.
