UKOM Data Report: November 2012
Despite reaching a record amount of users in the preceding months, November brought a fall in the UK’s online population.
Even the onset of the festive period and the online panic buying that comes with it couldn’t stop the overall number of people going online from falling.
A month on month drop of 868,000 users saw the online population for November total at 43 million, with 41.5 million of those accessing the internet from work and home locations. This non-mobile usage saw a 4% rise year on year.
Search engines and portals dominated the 100 most popular sites, making up 22%. Google, Bing and Yahoo! all feature in the top ten, with member communities such as Facebook and Blogger falling into the Portal category.
News and Information is the second most popular category of sites with 19%, followed by Entertainment sites such as YouTube and iTunes with 16%. Surprisingly multi-category Commerce sites only make up 13% of the top 100 sites but two entries, Amazon and eBay, feature in the top ten.
Top Mass Merchandisers
Despite the dip in the digital universe, the dread of facing the high street in the run up to Christmas saw all of the ten most popular retail sites receive a boost in activity. The leading provider of the stress-free digital shopping experience, Amazon, recorded a record amount of unique visitors with 22.8 million people heading to the site in November.
That translates to 53% of all those online during the month. Users also spent ten more minutes on the site each, compared to the same period in 2011.
The second most popular merchandiser was Tesco, although it attracted a significantly smaller amount of visitors than the leading competitor. 10 million unique users went to the grocery site in November, a massive 15% increase month on month. The supermarket website was responsible for the biggest actual rise in the top ten, up 1.3 million users.
Electrical supplier Currys witnessed the biggest percentage increase over the month. The white good merchandiser saw visitors jump by over 1 million, which translates to a whopping 14% increase and jumping up two places.
Victim of the law, Play.com fell down one place along with ASDA’s main grocery site.
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Top Video
While the UK’s online universe was busy buying presents for loved ones, they neglected their duties to indulge themselves with viral videos and catching up on Emmerdale. Eight of the top 10 video sites were affected by the build up to the festive period.
LOVEFiLM.com was hit the hardest, with over 1 million of the previous month’s visitors MIA. The film rental and streaming service was down 38% month on month. Surprisingly this resulted in the Amazon-owned site falling two places in the top ten.
YouTube remained at the top of the pile, as usual, with 24.7 million users (a 4% drop). ITV Player saw the second biggest percentage fall – down 20%. The broadcaster’s catch up site was down by 587,000 people.
It wasn’t all bad news though. Machinima, broadcaster of original shows and The Walking Dead and Battlestar Galactica spin-offs, saw their YouTube channel rise by 8.5%. A total of 3 million users helped the channel move up two places in the top ten.
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Top News & Current Affairs
November brought even worse news for the top providers of online news. The BBC lead the way with a massive unique audience of 21.6 million visiting the main site, reaching half of everyone that made up the digital population. The BBC News site was in second place with a significantly smaller user base. 11 million people went to the broadcaster’s news-specific site, down by just under 1 million people compared to October (the biggest actual loss of the top ten).
The conservative-leaning Telegraph site was up next, losing just over half a million users in the month. The site still managed to attract 6 million viewers, helping it remain the fifth most popular news site but ranked in 49th place overall. On average, each visitor to the Telegraph site spent nearly 17 minutes browsing, up from 15 minutes in October.
The collective force of Trinity Mirror Nationals barely made it into the top ten but witnessed the largest percentage drop in users. The online entity was down just under half a million people month on month, resulting in a 13% drop.
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Further breakdowns and reports can found in the Online database.