Nielsen Data Report: July 2013

The UK’s digital audience saw a slight increase in July, according to data recently released by online measurement company Nielsen. In total, 40.8 million people in the UK accessed the internet across the month, an increase of 665,000 people since June.

The number of people going online in the UK has been falling month on month since March 2013. While this isn’t particularly unusual for the summer months, the upturn in activity during the country’s holiday period suggests an overall uptake in users.

Out of the total digital universe for the month, 39 million accessed the internet from home or work locations. To date, the UK’s online population peaked in October 2012 with just under 44 million users.

Further breakdowns can be found using the Universe Profile report here.

Top Video

While there was no doubt that Google-owned YouTube would remain the most popular online video player, July did bring a huge loss for the site. The video uploading platform took a knock of nearly 8% over the month, translating to an actual loss of almost 1.6 million users.

This is a big hit for the country’s premium video site, especially considering that the overall amount of people online in the UK increased over the same period. While YouTube‘s reach dropped from 51% to 47% in July, the amount of time users spent on the site increased dramatically.

Those that did visit the site increased the average time from 1 minute and 38 seconds to three minutes and 23 seconds per person.

It wasn’t looking too good for the rest of the top ten either as just one site reported an increase in unique audience. After building a positive buzz for the first few months of the year, Netflix upped its audience by 11% in July, with time per person increasing from 28 seconds to two minutes and 48 seconds.

This helped Netflix jump up two spaces in the top ten, knocking both Vimeo and ITV Player down two spots.

Top News & Information

There was plenty of inner movement within the most popular News and Information sites but the overall trend was clear – despite the increase of the UK’s online universe, eight out of ten news sites were affected by less traffic in July.

Worst hit was Wikipedia, the internet’s central hub of collective knowledge, which was down by a whopping 2.3 million users month on month. This 15% decrease saw the collaborative encyclopedia’s reach fall from 39% to 32%, but time spent increased by nine minutes to 34 minutes per person.

Yahoo! Answers witnessed a similar percentage change, with a loss of 1.3 million users bringing its total audience to 7.7 million in July. Despite the loss, the user generated answer site moved up one place in the top ten.

While the main BBC site saw a very small decrease in activity, BBC News boasted a slight increase of 4%. A total of 9.7 million users visited the news section of the broadcaster’s site during the month, with time spent jumping by an entire 20 minutes per user.

Another channel of the main site, BBC Weather, gathered enough new users to move up two places. The 16% rise brought the total amount of users to 6.2 million.

Top Commerce

Things were looking slightly better for the world of commerce as three of the top ten sites reported an increase, with the most popular shopping sites remaining in the same order despite their mixed fortunes.

Best off was the national bargain warehouse Argos , which saw an increase of 624,000 users (up 10%). Marks & Spencer followed, upping its audience by 205,000 users and moving up nine places overall.

Amazon remained top dog in the digital commerce world but dropped one place overall due to the biggest fall in the top ten – down 4%, translating to a loss of 703,000 users. The site still boasted a 44% reach with each user viewing an impressive 53 pages.

The second biggest loss belonged to random offers site Groupon, which fell by 19%. The loss of 659,000 users brought the site’s total audience to 2.8 million users, meaning the site dropped 13 overall places to rank as the 90^th most popular site.

While Amazon and eBay rode high in pole position with 17.8 and 16 million users, respectively, there was a significant drop off from the third position downwards.

With Tesco there was nearly a 10 million user difference with its higher competitor, while John Lewis dropped all the way down to 2.7 million.

Further breakdowns and reports can found in the Online database.