UKOM Data Report: January 2012

The dawn of 2012 brought a record amount of the UK’s population online, according to the latest data released by online research company UKOM. January saw 40.7 million UK users access the internet, the highest figure in UKOM’s first 24 months of reporting. Traditionally there has been a slight rise in activity during January as workers and students return from the Christmas break to their usual routine.

Many of the top digital brands reflected this increase in traffic. January’s overall figure represents a 5% rise in total audience since January 2010. As usual, the top 100 entries featured the web’s most familiar names and channels, with few surprises.

Search engines like Google Image Search, Yahoo! and Bing made up 20% of the top 100 sites and exclusively make up the top five overall destinations. The vast majority are commercial properties, while government information sites like Directgov and NHS made up only 3%. The top sites by category report can be found here.

Brands

Two brands in the top 10, which saw a boost in the build-up to Christmas, saw an expected dip in popularity in January. Amazon lost almost two million unique users (just under 10%) MoM and the retail giant’s reach of the online population fell to under 50%. While the first month of 2012 hit Amazon hard, it still managed to grab a unique audience of 19.9 million users (a YoY rise of 10%).

Auction site eBay dropped only two places overall but lost just under 1 million users MoM. Despite this, actual activity on the site increased; users looked at more pages and spent fifteen minutes longer on average.

The largest percentage change of the top 10 belonged to Wikipedia. The collaborative project saw a 13% MoM spike in traffic, with a total of 16.3 million users visiting the site in January. Yahoo! moved up three places in the top 10 and increased the amount of users by 1.3 million.

UK Newspapers

After mostly disappointing results for online UK newspapers in December, the majority of titles bounced back in 2012. The Guardian saw the biggest actual rise in audience, increasing its users by 890,000 MoM. While the liberal digital brand remained in second place, the 18% increase was accompanied by the amount of time users spent online. In January each person, on average, spent 20 minutes and 40 seconds on the site, a six minute increase from December.

MailOnline continued to rule over the UK digital papers, increasing users by 9.5% MoM and ranking 35^th position overall. The Independent, only one of two of these sites to actually gain users in December, witnessed the only loss in the top ten. The site dropped 13% of its audience MoM and reached only 5.4% of the online population. The Sun and The Times increased users by 19.5% and 15.4% respectively.

January brought an extra 485,000 users for the London Evening Standard site and while this is not a huge number comparatively, this represents a whopping MoM increase of 46% for the London paper.

Social Media

Facebook lost 409,000 users in January, but this only represented a 1.6% decrease and the social network remains in the number one spot (and third overall). BBC Communities was also down slightly (-141,000 users) but every other entry in the top ten pulled in more users compared to December.

Blogger has the largest actual increase, up 862,000 users, and displayed an active reach of 23%. As the holidays came to a close professional networking site LinkedIn grabbed the largest percentage increase of the top ten, bringing the total amount of users to just under four million users.