Happy New Year 2017 to all of our readers! We hope you enjoyed the celebrations last night. We want to take this moment to say thank you to all of our readers for visiting during the year. The smartphone industry is maturing and it is becoming even harder to wow consumers with mobile devices, we hope that Sony has some great products up its sleeve to do just that in 2017.
As is tradition for us, we have provided some website statistics from the year just gone. We celebrate XB’s sixth birthday today and we hope many of you will stick around to see what is in store for the Xperia brand in the year ahead.
If there are any suggestions you have for the site (nothing is too small), then please do not hesitate to leave any comments below or get in touch with us here. As always, your tips are invaluable to us, making us aware of the latest Xperia-related news items, whether that is for firmware updates or rumours or something else entirely. Thank you for everyone that got in touch and please keep them coming into 2017.
2016 Xperia Blog readership statistics
Top countries by readership
When looking at where most of our readers are from, the top seven countries remain the same as last year. Most of our readers are from India at 10%, with the USA in second place with 7% and the UK in third place with 6%.
The rest of the top 15 countries in terms of readership include broadly the same regions as last year, albeit with some countries swapping places. Netherlands and Italy are new entrants into the top 15, with Russia and Canada dropping out.
Readership by Mobile Devices
Despite the rapid growth of mobile, most of our readership still takes place on the desktop (52%). However, this saw a large year-on-year decline of 15 percentage points compared to last year. Mobile is now 44% of our readership, up from 27% the year before. We would expect readership on mobile to surpass the desktop during 2017. Interestingly, readership by tablet devices fell during the year to 4%, a decline of two percentage points. It seems like a lot of you are reading the news less and less on the tablet.
Readership by mobile device is unsurprisingly dominated by Sony products at 66%, up by eight percentage points compared to the prior year. Those reading on Apple and Samsung devices take second and third place respectively with 7%. Readership from Google products was down significantly from 4% of readership the year before, to just 1% in 2016. LG is the only new entrant in the top 5, usurping Mozilla’s fifth position last year.
Readership by Browser
Chrome continues to be the most popular browser to access the site. You can see the data below from 2012 to 2016, which shows Chrome accounting for 70% of visits in 2016 (up from 46% in 2012). Firefox remains the second favourite, with 11% of visits in 2016, although it has been on a downward trend for a while and is down five percentage points during the year. In fact all of the other browsers, including Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera saw a muted performance.
Most read stories in 2016 (by number of Pageviews)
The following posts were the most read during 2016. The most read posts mainly relate to guides to installing software using Flashtool and XperiFirm and the big new software releases for Xperia devices.
1. New Flashtool (0.9.19.1) brings compatibility to all Xperia devices
2. Install Xperia Marshmallow using Flashtool and XperiFirm [Guide]
3. FlashTool version 0.9.18.1 allows you to download Xperia firmware files
4. Android Marshmallow officially arrives on the Xperia Z2, Z3 and Z3 Compact (23.5.A.0.570)
5. Guide to installing Xperia Lollipop using XperiFirm and Flashtool
6. Global Xperia Z5 series now receiving Android Marshmallow (32.1.A.1.163)
7. For those on Marshmallow – STAMINA battery mode will see a return
8. Xperia Marshmallow Beta released to select Xperia Z3, Z3 Compact and Z2 owners (23.5.A.0.486)
9. Sony expands Marshmallow rollout to Xperia Z3 Dual, Xperia Z2 Tablet and other Z2/Z3 variants
10. Xperia Companion – Sony’s new PC software to manage your Xperia device
Social Media
For us it is important that you can access our content by whichever means suits you. As things stand you can subscribe to our feeds on RSS or via email (sign up in the box on the sidebar). We also have feeds of all the major social media players. As a measure of posterity, we include our follower counts below as at 31st December 2016.
Facebook page likes: 35,316 [+23% over the prior year]
Google+ page followers: 63,849 [+1% over the prior year]
Twitter follower count: 69,314 [+4% over the prior year]
