The iPhone’s growing presence on the Web, having leveled off before the introduction of the iPhone 3G, surged in the month and a half since, according to preliminary data released Sunday by Net Applications, an Aliso Viejo, CA-based Web service company.
The percentage of Web hits coming from iPhones passed 0.2% in June and then dipped in the weeks that followed. But it peaked on August 23rd at a record high 0.48%, according to the new data, before drifting back last week.
Net Applications’ brief report, issued in advance of its August survey of operating system market share data, offered no explanation for last week’s fall-off, but it did attribute the jump in July and August to the flood of iPhones 3Gs sold by Apple (AAPL) and its partners since the device’s July 11 launch.
[In its August survey, released early Monday, Net Applications reported that the iPhone’s share of global Web usage increased 58% in the course of the month, climbing from 0.19% in July to 0.30% in August. In other words, one out of every 333 Web hits in August came from an iPhone. See here.]
The iPhone has cast an oversize shadow on the Internet from the moment the original model was introduced in late June 2007. By the time Net Applications issued its July 2007 survey, the iPhone already represented 0.04% of the visits to websites operated by the firm’s clients. That’s more than double what one would expect, given that there were about 1.4 billion computers connected to the Internet at that point, according to Internet World Stats, and only 270,000 or so were iPhones.
You can see the latest data at the New Applications website here. The company’s surveys are based on data collected from the browsers of visitors — some 160 million per month — to its customers websites.
In the August survey issued Monday, the iPhone OS, with a 0.30% share, was the fourth-most popular operating system on the Web after Windows (90.69%), Mac OS (7.84%) and Linux (0.92%).