UKOM Data Report: June 2011

The total UK online universe declined in June – down 730,000 users month on month to 39.5 million. Although total users had been rising steadily in the last few months, June’s figure shows the first drop in general online take up since February of this year.

Despite the recent monthly fluxuations the online audience has risen by half a million users over the year. 20% of those who went online have a household income of £50,000 or higher while 15% earned under £15,000. Over 10% of those involved in the survey were unemployed in June.

 18% of people online in the UK are based in London (seven million) down 4% YoY. The second largest area for internet usage is the Midlands, with 12% (five million).

While users aged 50 and older make up the largest age group (32%) they have only grown by 7% in the last year. By comparison, the younger audience of 18-24 year olds have seen rapid growth YoY, with a rise of 23%. Users aged 25-34 saw a 7% drop.

Brands

Summertime proved a distraction for the online population – all of the top ten brands witnessed a significant drop in users in June, fuelling the overall loss of users. Worst affected was the BBC, down over one million users since May with a total unique audience for June standing at 19.8 million, pushing it down to fifth place. The BBC site also saw a drop in active reach, down to 50%. Google also saw its reach fall by 2%, down to 83% for June. However, the amount of time spent and pages per person actually increased.

Google remained the UK’s most popular online brand with a unique audience of 33 million users. Wikipedia was also badly affected, losing 809,000 users, but remained the tenth most popular online brand in the UK. Yahoo! also lost around the same amount of users but managed to push past BBC to take fourth place.

Newspapers

The top ten newspaper websites didn’t fare much better than the top brands, with only three newspaper sites gaining users in June. MailOnline lost 11,000 users since May although it still managed to cling on to the top spot. The amount of people viewing The Daily Mail site fell, pages and time spent per person increased.

Guardian.co.uk saw the biggest actual loss over the month, down 879,000 users (17%) with an active reach of 11%. While the News of the World phone hacking scandal continued to gain momentum in June, the top News International websites had mixed fortunes. The Sun picked up 8.6% more users, a rise of 222,000, moving up two places as a result. The Times however, was down 98,000 users for the month, a MoM loss of 7.3%

Amid the escalating controversy News of the World entered the top ten, rising by 6% MoM, with 645,000 users. Newsquest Local Media saw the second biggest actual loss of the month. The collection of hyper-local sites lost 29% of its audience, sending it down two places.

Social Sites

Despite the dominance of Facebook and Twitter in the arena of social media, users are spending much more time on less known networks. The top ten social sites ranked by pages viewed per person looks significantly different when simply tallied by the amount of users. Tagged.com only attracted 297,000 users in June but almost trebled the amount of pages viewed per person to 833 (up 185%). The average user spent over four hours on the site throughout the month, an increase of 2.5 hours MoM.

Polish social network NK.pl only managed to reach .35% of the UK online population but captivated those who did log on. NK.pl ranked 58 in its category but pages viewed per person jumped up by 100MoM to 723 in June. Facebook, the third most popular site overall, saw its pages fall by 26% in June (554 pages per person) but it did reach 66% of the online population.

Video Sites

YouTube and the BBC iPlayer saw a drop in users in June; Google-owned YouTube lost 4% of its audience MoM, with a total of 18.8 million users for June. Rebecca Black helped the video streaming giant peak in March 2011 with 19.6 million users. BBC’s iPlayer remained in second place despite shedding 218,000 users. Google Video lost 30% of it’s unique audience in June, the biggest percentage loss in the top ten. Both Channel 4oD and ITV Player moved up one place, gaining 93,000 and 15,000 users respectively.