Last Thursday Adobe posted the version penetration data gathered from our June study. The numbers were great! For the United States, Flash Player 9 is at 91.2%. The June study comes right at 1 year of penetration for this player version.

Flash Player 9 is at 91.2% (USA, June 2007)

At conferences we have started showing the data in relative comparison to the penetration of Flash Players 7 and 8. Now that Flash Player 9 has reached one year of data, it is interesting to see the curves. While this particular study put Flash Player 9 out ahead by a bit, Flash Players 8 and 9 have penetrated at almost exactly the same rate (Flash Player 7 being a fair bit slower).

The data, while always fun, should give you a good tool to plan out your own Flash deployments. For the entire history of Flash, the penetration rate has never decreased. You should be able to count on any version of Flash Player reaching 80% in 7-9 months and 90% in a year. This holds true for major versions as well as minor versions.

With the features that have been added in the Flash Player 9 dot releases, we’ve been hearing a lot of questions recently about minor version penetration data. For a good read on the subject, I’d suggest reading Emmy’s post.