UKOM Data Report: January 2011

The UK’s online population has remained above 40 million for the second month in a row. January saw 40.1 million users go online, according to data recently released by UKOM. This is the third month that the unique audience has passed the 40 million mark in the 13 months UKOM has been reporting figures.

The overall audience actually fell in January, losing 1.2 million users in the post-Christmas slump. UK online audience has seen little growth over the past year with only a 3.2% rise (1.3 million users). The unique audience peaked in April last year with 40.5 million users going online over the month, resulting in an average audience of 39.3 million users each month over 2010.

The majority of users fall into the older age bracket with 60% of the online population aged 35 and over. The largest age group are the over 50s with 12.4 million users, while people aged 35-49 make up the second largest group with 11.3 million users. Surprisingly 18-24 year olds represent the smallest group with only 4.5 million people fitting into this bracket.

Higher managerial and professional users represented the smallest social group online in January, with 2.4 million users for the A category. Social Grade B makes up the largest social group (30% of everyone online) with 12 million users. According to the data, the much sought after ABC1 demographic makes up 60% of the UK’s online presence. London continues to have the highest number of users followed by Southern region with 18% and 10% of the nation’s unique audience respectively.

Brands

Google dropped 950,000 users in January but remained the number one brand over the month with a total audience of 34 million, a 2.7% decrease since December. WindowsLive trailed not far behind in second place but actually gained users after the surge of traffic over December, resulting in 27.6 million users. The BBC saw the most significant loss of the top ten brands, shedding just under 3 million users . Although the drop is substantial, December saw record traffic for the brand contributing to the 12.8% negative change in January. This led to Yahoo! moving past the broadcasting corporation to become the UK’s fifth most popular online brand, also helped along by a growth of 205,000 users month on month. The first month of 2011 saw Wikipedia score record traffic of 15.8 million users in the UK, a 9% jump from December.

Newspapers

Most of the ten highest ranking newspaper sites saw a slight increase in January with only Newsquest Local Media seeing a fall. The MailOnline continued its run as the nation’s most popular newspaper website but only gained 4,000 new users. A unique audience of 5.6 million in January means that the Associated Newspapers website was actually down 0.5% YoY. In second place was Guardian.co.uk, gaining a respectable 347,000 users, narrowing the gap with Mail Online. While Guardian.co.uk’s traffic has remained consistent throughout the last thirteen months January’s figure showed a YoY decrease of 12%. News of the World crawled back into the top ten, with the largest MoM increase but actually only gained 162,000 new users. The only News International site left sitting on the open side of Murdoch’s paywall, The Sun, had a fantastic start to the year with a huge increase of 19%. Sister site, The Times, seems to be gathering momentum with more users warming to the idea of paid subscription. January saw The Times increase traffic by 32% MoM.

Mass Merchandisers

As consumer’s wallets were feeling the after effects of the Christmas period, online consumers turned away from the mass merchandiser sites in droves. Nine of the ten most popular sites lost over 1 million users in January, four of them shedding over 2 million. Marks & Spencer saw the biggest actual loss over the month down a massive 2.5 million users, a 39% drop MoM. Amazon remained head and shoulders above its competitors, with an extra 9.5 million users ahead of Argos. The UK owned company remained in second place but also saw a significant drop in users, down 20% MoM. Although Amazon’s traffic remains strong it did see a 10% loss over the month. The online retailing giant peaked in November 2010 with 20 million users.

Social Networks

Early 2011 saw professional networking site LinkedIn continue to grow in popularity, gaining 695,000 more users over January. A total audience of 3.1 million for the month means that LinkedIn has grown by over 40% YoY. Facebook remained the number one choice for socialising online but witnessed a drop in traffic over the first month of the year. The most famous networking site of them all was ahead of the nearest rival by a massive 17 million users, although there was a -1.3% drop MoM. Publishing platforms Blogger and WordPress both saw increases in traffic with a 6.5% and 11% jump in users respectively.