Evidence of Big Surface and Kindle Holiday Sales Reported
This past fall, Microsoft took a look at its foundering Surface tablet fortunes and decided to double down with a follow-up, the aptly named Surface 2 line of devices. While the company hasn’t released any information about the Surface 2’s sales, it did sound as though it was doing pretty well shortly after its launch. Today, new evidence has popped up to suggest that more than a few folks have gotten Surface 2 tablets as holiday gifts, meaning that Microsoft may have done more right than wrong this time around.
The news comes by way of a report from advertising network Chitika (via Neowin), which compiled browsing data via tablets before and after Christmas. The results show simply that there was more traffic on Surface devices after Christmas than there was—enough for the Surface to surpass what has been one of the most popular Android devices. Said the report:
“Surface users generated more tablet traffic than all Google Nexus tablet users following the holiday, making Microsoft the fourth-largest source of continental tablet Web traffic should it maintain the lion’s share of this latest share growth.”
So how big an increase was there? While Surface-based traffic is still pretty paltry compared to that generated by Apple’s line of iPads, the Surface jumped from 0.5 percent on December 20 to a whopping 2.3 percent on December 29. In short, it seems that lots of folks bought Surfaces—though, whether they’re the new version or discounted original Surfaces isn’t clear. Either way, it’s good news for Microsoft in terms of getting more folks in on the Windows ecosystem.
But while that’s impressive for Microsoft, two Android-based device makers saw even more spectacular improvements after the holiday. Samsung’s line of devices jumped from 0.3 percent to 5.9 percent, and Amazon’s Kindle tablets had the most drastic gains, going from 0.6 percent to 9.4 percent.
Clearly the online retail giant’s recent campaigns to make Kindle ownership more affordable had a lot to do with that. And that means that Amazon will surely reap some more long term benefits from that huge spike as well.