After Just 48 Hours, Mountain Lion Already Accounts For 3.2% Of Mac Web Traffic

Just 48 hours after its official launch, Apple’s Mountain Lion, the latest version of Apple’s desktop operating system, has already captured 3.2% of Mac web traffic according to a report by ad network Chitika. Given its low cost ($19.99) and the fact that it’s available as a download and very easy to install, chances are these numbers will continue to increase quickly over the next few days. Mountain Lion has already passed OS X 10.4 (Tiger) in Chitika’s stats and is on its way to pass Leopard in the near future.

Last year, Chitika reported that the adoption of OS.X 10.7 Lion was lagging behind expectations and that users weren’t updating from Snow Leopard at their usual rates. Judging by the data Chitika released today, that continues to remain true, as Snow Leopard remains the most popular Mac OS on the company’s network (45.5%), followed by Lion (35%). As our own MG Siegler pointed out in his review earlier this week, though, “If you didn’t like Lion, you’ll probably love Mountain Lion even more because it seems to fix a lot of the performance/quirkiness issues that some folks were having with the last version of OS X.” While not every Mac that runs Snow Leopard today can be upgraded to Mountain Lion, chances are that quite a few Snow Leopard users will decide to finally update their computers now.

I just took a glance at our own analytics data for TechCrunch.com and according to Google Analytics, almost 17% of those of you running Mac have already upgraded to Mountain Lion. Also, while Snow Leopard remains the most popular Mac OS in Chitika’s data, almost 60% of TechCrunch readers run Lion today and just 22% use Snow Leopard.

As with all of these stats, then, it’s important to remember that the data is limited to users who visit sites that are part of Chitika’s ad network. This could skew the data, but Chitika’s numbers have typically been very close to those we’ve seen from other third-party analytics companies.