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Microsoft and Sony have been involved in a heated race, more commonly known as the console war, since 2001, when the first-generation Xbox took on the PlayStation 2.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, however, it hasn’t been a huge contest (except perhaps for the Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3 clash) and it seems the latest showdown isn’t much different, or so suggests data that SimilarWeb shared. with TNW.
While visits to playstation.com and xbox.com were relatively parallel in the run-up to each brand’s pre-order launch dates, traffic to the PlayStation site peaked at just over 892,000 on September 16 when Sony started pre-orders for its next-generation console. In contrast, the Xbox site surpassed 776,200 visits in its respective pre-order launch on September 22.
To give you a better idea, the PlayStation pre-order peak represented a 327.4% increase in traffic, on average, compared to the previous days of the month. It was also 279.4% higher than the traffic to xbox.com that day.
Xbox’s pre-order peak, on the other hand, saw a 263.6% increase in traffic compared to the previous days in the month, and 211.4% more visits than those received by playstation.com that day. .
The bottom line? The PlayStation stock launch drew about 116,000 eyes (or 232,000 if you want to be pedantic) more than Xbox’s, according to data from SimilarWeb. That being said, these numbers don’t tell us much about how that translates into actual sales, so take it with a grain of salt. It is also worth noting that all the data refers to visits to the desktop and does not include mobile traffic.
SimilarWeb notes that both brands relied primarily on organic search for most of their traffic, with PlayStation getting slightly more organic traffic than Xbox.
“Another strategy xbox.com employs is to redirect traffic away from its site to third-party retailers who sell its product,” SimilarWeb notes in its report.
In case you were wondering, these are the biggest benefactors of this approach:
- microsoft.com at 26.7%
- bestbuy.com at 6.6%
- walmart.com 1.8%
- target.com at 1%
- gamestop.com at 0.4%
It’s worth noting that, with the exception of Microsoft, all other retailers offer both brands. In fact, it appears that PlayStation was more popular than Xbox with some third-party retailers even during the launch week of the Series S and Series X.
“In contrast, during the week of the Playstation 5 pre-order launch, across all retailers, the Playstation page significantly outnumbered the Xbox page, although there are no redirects from the main site, ”adds SimilarWeb.
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Posted on Oct 6, 2020 – 14:17 UTC
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