Firefox Popularity Spurs Mozilla Traffic Surge

Media ratings company Nielsen/NetRatings today reported that the Mozilla.org Web site has benefited from its Firefox browser’s popularity with a surge in unique audience over the last 12 months.

In March 2004, Nielsen/NetRatings reported that Mozilla.org had a unique audience of 1.1 million home and work Internet users in the U.S. That number jumped 284 percent to 4.1 million unique users last month.

The Firefox page recorded high growth in terms of unique audience. In March 2005, Nielsen/NetRatings reported that the page had a unique audience of 2.7 million, up 237 percent from the 795,000 it drew in June 2004.

Nielsen/NetRatings’ audience numbers are, however, a far cry from the download numbers reported at the SpreadFirefox community marketing site, which claims that Firefox has been downloaded approximately 44.7 million times thus far.

The Nielsen/NetRatings report also broke down the Mozilla.org audience by sex and found that more men than women visited the site in March 2005. Women made up 29 percent of Mozilla.org’s site visitors while men comprised 71 percent.

“The search for an alternative browser has grown in recent years, as the Internet’s early adopters have begun to think of the browser as something other than a commodity,” said Ken Cassar, director of strategic analytics, Nielsen/NetRatings in a statement.