Outlier

Should we charge Mac users to read this blog?

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the travel site Orbitz has found Mac users are bigger spenders when it comes to booking travel.

In particular, Mac users (relative to PC users) spend on average $20-30 more per hotel night and are 40% more likely to book a 4-star or 5-star hotel. Orbitz is now using this insight to market more expensive travel options to Mac users.

The big behavioral/demographic difference between Mac and PC users made us curious about the breakdown of visitors to the Opower blog in its first two weeks since launch. We found that 48% of our visitors have come from Windows operating systems and 33% from Mac systems–with most of the remaining visits coming from mobile devices.

While Windows users account for the highest absolute number of visits to our blog, Mac users are significantly over-represented as a group, in light of the fact that they only represent 8% of all web traffic.

So it appears we’re attracting a lot of Mac users. If they’re willing to pay $20-30 more per hotel night than a PC user, I wonder if they’d be willing to pay to read our blog!

Just kidding…the Opower blog will remain free to all.

About Outlier

Outlier explores trends in how people are using energy at home. Pulling from an unprecedented (and still growing) amount of energy data—currently drawn from 50 million homes—Opower crunches energy-use information from more than 75 utility partners every day, and cross-references that with weather, household, and demographic information to produce compelling analyses in the Outlier series.