the comments don't seem to match the graphs... for whatever reason (maybe related to advocacy), I think it's interesting. (...)
lately I've been trying to get a better idea of lossless codec usage and I have some stats that may be interesting. what they say exactly is more open to interpretation but I think one thing that seems clear is that the polls here don't extrapolate to the outside world (nothing wrong with that BTW).
(data gathered some time througout apr/may 2007, also included some mp3-related stats for some perspective)
answers.yahoo.com results for query:
: 42298 'mp3'
: 102 'flac'
: 9 'shn'
: 8 'apple lossless'
: 0 'alac'
: 1 'wavpack'
: 1 'wavepack'
: 1 'wma lossless'
: 0 'wmal'
: 0 'optimfrog'
del.icio.us results for tag:
: 182628 'mp3'
: 2228 'flac'
: 301 'shn'
: 141 'alac'
: 95 'wavpack'
inlinks (via siteexplorer.yahoo.com)
: 33068 flac.sourceforge.net + flac.sf.net (doesn't include sourceforge.net/projects/flac)
: 8619 www.monkeysaudio.com + monkeysaudio.com
: 5248 www.wavpack.com + wavpack.com
: 2925 www.true-audio.com + true-audio.com (tta)
: 1843 www.losslessaudio.org + losslessaudio.org (ofr)
: 1335 www.lossless-audio.com + lossless-audio.com (la)
google hits for query: (approximate)
: 662000000 'mp3'
: 8670000 'flac'
: 2330000 'shn'
: 2090000 'monkeys audio'
: 1590000 'alac'
: 730000 '"apple lossless"'
: 714000 'wavpack'
: 109000 'optimfrog'
: 102000 '"wma lossless"'
site traffic/month (I only have sourceforge estimates for my site, others I got from trafficestimate.com 30-day estimates which could be wildly wrong)
: ~2000000 flac.sourceforge.net (~2M hits/month 700K pageviews/mo ? project page hits/mo 110K downloads/mo)
: 100400 www.monkeysaudio.com
: 16100 www.wavpack.com
: 11700 www.true-audio.com (TTA)
(monkeysaudio.com may be inflated since spammers have assaulted the forums)
lossless-only web search query volume estimate
: 80% FLAC-related ('flac' 'free lossless audio codec' etc)
: 13% Shorten-related ('shn', not 'shorten' because of too many false positives)
: 3% ALAC-related ('alac' 'apple lossless' etc)
: 2% APE-related ('monkey's audio' etc, not 'ape' because of too many false positives)
: 1% WMAL-related ('wmal' 'wma lossless' etc)
: 1% WV related ('wavpack' 'wavepack' 'wavepak' etc)
: ~0% OptimFROG-related ('optimfrog' 'ofr' etc)
edit: typos, clarity