Are there any analytics on how many people actually print webpages? [closed]

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Has anyone, with a large sampling, done research on how many users actually print webpages? 开发者_StackOverflow I'm looking for some percentage values. .01%, 1%, etc actually print webpages.

It seems like a waste of time, to create design oriented print pages, if the stats extremely low.

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It is very easy to create some print styles for your stylesheet to make printing easier on people.

As an example: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/

In the same way that not everyone who visits your site will be disabled, the best practice is still to create sites that work for people with accessibility problems.

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I don't have a link to a study for you but I'm very confident that it depends heavily on the type of content. I.e. the percentage of people who print a youtube video page is for sure much lower than those who print a recipe from a online cookbook.

So it's probably best to run your own study on the particular website where you need it. You can either make a little poll for the users of your site or track how often pages actually get printed.

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This is not a metric that is usually tracked.

Since one needs to differentiate the regular page from the printable page, this requires a custom implementation on the printable version page that sends a particular tracking code/cookie.

It is not that hard to implement, one can even have printable pages tracked in google analytics or any analytic engine, but as I said it does require preparation and most people don't track this metric in particular.

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It is possible through JavaScript to track the actual printing event with IE browsers. Considering users most likely won't switch to IE just to do the printing, it would give some sort of accurate indication of what % of the IE users, print the page.

For more information about the onbeforeprint and onafterprint events have a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536672(v=vs.85).aspx

Btw, I am not saying that collecting this data solely from IE users would give an accurate indication of the overall % of printed pages across all browsers, because IE is far more commonly used in office environments rather than home environments.