UKOM Data Report: April 2012

The release of the April’s traffic figures also saw the launch of new Hybrid data from UKOM; as well as the home and work panel that has been used to collate pre-April 2012 data. The company now measures traffic from ‘other locations’ ie outside Home and Work. This has resulted in sites seeing a rise in traffic compared to previous months. You can learn more about UKOM’s new Hybrid model here.

The UK’s online universe was made up of 41 million users in April, including those accessing the internet from other locations such as mobiles and tablets. The work and home panel alone accounted for 36.6 million of these (trended below).

Brands

Despite the changes in methodology the top ten brands survived intact, with Google firmly cemented at the top of the list. The most popular internet brands have a wide range of reach, with Google being visited by 86% (35 million) of those who go online in the UK, while Microsoft by comparison is visited by 44% (18 million). Google’s popularity is so evident that it accumulated almost twice as many visitors than that of the tenth most popular brand, Wikipedia.

Facebook remained as popular as ever and continued to be the second most visited brand by UK users. The BBC reached just over half of all users, with those that did visit the site viewing an average of 95 pages each. The top ten features three of the best-know international search engines with Bing and Yahoo! coming behind Google with 26 and 21 million users respectively.

Online Newspapers

MailOnline continued to pull UK users into its vortex of conservative hysteria and essential Jersey Shore news, remaining the most popular online national news site in April. Not only does the site attract the highest number of monthly users but is also extremely successful at retaining their attention – each of the 7.6 million visitors to the site spent an average of 49 minutes clicking through pages.

Its closest competitor in terms of time spent is The Sun, although there is a big gap between the two. While the News International site only attracted 3.5 million in April, users were on the site for an average time of 21 minutes, almost a minute more than The Guardian‘s 6.6 million users. London Evening Standard had the lowest amount of traffic and time spent per person out of the top ten newspaper sites. The Times site only grabbed 756,000 users over the month (and ranked 621^st place overall) but the amount of time the users spent on the pay-walled site outstripped that of the Telegraph, which attracted a significantly higher number of users (5.6 million).

Sites by Time Per Person

While MailOnline displays a strong influence over its users, other sites take user retention to another level. Blizzard Entertainment, home to such time-raiding distractions such as World of Warcraft, outstrips the competition; 327,000 users spent an average of 21 hours playing on the site. The portal, which includes other popular online games such as StarCraft and Diablo, attracted a higher proportion of men, with seven males to every three females. Six of the top ten were purely online gaming sites, like RIFT or Tribal Wars, while three were avatar-based chat sites such as WeeWorld and SmallWorlds. While the audience for these type of destinations are relatively small, they tend to envelope their users in such a way that bigger online brands can only be jealous of.

Sites by Pages Per Person

While browser-based games such as those mentioned above attract a strong loyalty the physical pages clicked do not rank highly, although there is some crossover with games; Tribal Wars, WeeWorld and The West also scored high number of pages per person. Games company Electronic Arts features twice in the top ten, powered by the direct-to-hard drive gaming store Origin. Tribal Wars, a browser-based game where users control a small village, had the highest number of pages per person out of the top 10,000 sites in April. On average, every one of 152,000 visitors to the site made their way through 4,435 pages. While this is phenomenally high, the site only rank 2,911^st overall.