BBC Online Second Most Popular UK Website

BBC Online is the second most popular UK site after only a year – 42% of UK users have visited the site within 2 weeks. Only Yahoo! UK & Ireland claimed a larger amount of visits, with 61% of UK users having visited the site in the same period. These findings are according to the first figures for online reach acquired by Fletcher Research’s UK Internet User Monitor.

Nigel Chapman, director of BBC Online, commented: “The research demonstrates the broad appeal and value of a public service BBC on the internet. Our role is to provide quality content and a trusted guide to the best of the web for all UK internet users. Now we will turn our attention to reaching the other 58 percent of users.”

William Reeve, research director at Fletcher, said: “Only a week after we saw the BBC’s share of television audiences fall below 30%, they show that their investment in new media is starting to pay off.”

Usage Of UK Web Portals

Fletcher also found that these internet users (64% of which are male) are moving away from television, with a third of British internet users spending less time in front of the TV.

The monitor polled 12,000 web users in December 1998 from an online questionnaire placed on over 50 major UK websites, combined with a telephone poll of 2,000 people.

William Reeve commented on the research: “We believe these findings are a great step forward for the UK online industry. Until now, the online industry has struggled to compare the usage of online titles with their traditional media cousins. The UK Internet User Monitor gives to the industry what the BARB panel gives TV and radio – the ‘reach’ or proportion of adults who use, watch or listen in a given time period. For web publishers, it’s far more important to know how many people its site reached than it is to say know how many pages its systems served.”

Fletcher Research: 0171 631 0202 … http://www.bbc.co.uk