Misleading 9% First Week Market Share

[Michael Boutros]

We have all heard of the report by NPD Group that in the Zune's first week, it captured 9% of all sales. However, what most of you have not heard is that the NPD Group does not count any sales from Amazon.com, Walmart, or Apple Stores, says the well-informed <a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=172">Adrian of ZDNet</a>. Walmart is very big in North America, especially during the Christmas season, and Amazon is the internet version of Walmart. This explains how the Zune was doing &quot;so well&quot; but was still very low on the Amazon top sold electronics list. Also, I am willing to bet at least a large chunk of iPod purchases are from Apple Stores, yet the NPD doesn't count them at all. I doubt it's because they don't feel like it, but probably because the stores do not want to give them that information.<br /><br />So while the Zune did get 9% of portable media players, it is misleading because three extremely large MP3 player retailers were taken out of the picture. If the writers who initially reported the 9% market share knew about the exclusion of these 3 retailers and didn't mention it because they wanted to make the Zune look better, I am honestly disappointed. A good writer shows the positives and negatives of anything.

[James Fee]

You want more of this "balanced" PR filth (http://news.google.com/news?q=zune+june+million)?

[LPD]

Most sales surveys are sampling based. NPD Group is one of the few that works with mostly hard numbers. So what's the difference in market share between 9% of 100,000 stores or 9% of 150,000 stores? Both have a relatively small margins of error. So I don't see a lack of journalistic integrity if the writer understood statistics.

NPD Group does track sales from WalMart, Amazon, and Apple, but not with their cooperation. They do not disclose how they get those numbers and they don't publish that data for free so they are not included in these public reports.