Apple, Microsoft see massive web traffic increase on Christmas day

iTunes and Zune site gets festive visitor boost

31 December 2007 11:45 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Web stats firm Hitwise has revealed that Christmas day was a good 'un online for both Apple and Microsoft.

The huge increases in traffic to the websites for Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Zune (the PMP range still not officially available in the UK) were due to consumers receiving one or other of the MP3 players as Christmas presents and going online to register and download the necessary software, says Hitwise.

The Zune site in particular saw some greatly improved figures with traffic practically tripling at 299% compared to the Christmas before and representing a 392% spike against the day before.

Apple's figures were none too shabby either with 0.69% of all detected web traffic belonging to the iTunes site (compared to 0.09% for the Zune).

The Apple Store itself climbed 169% on Christmas day - perhaps folk releasing that the exciting looking present under the tree wasn't the iPod they'd hoped for and ordering one themselves....