UKOM Data Report: February 2011

The UK’s online audience fell below 40 million in February, according to data released by online measurement company UKOM.

This was the second month in a row that the total monthly audience dropped, resulting in 39.2 million, down 1.2 million users from December.

Despite the increase of online activity, running up to and after the Christmas period, superfluous users have been abandoning online shopping and social networking since January. The result is a small YoY increase in the total audience of 1.5% for February. The average monthly unique audience across 2010 was 39.3 million users.

Older users continue to dominate the country’s online landscape with people aged 35 and older taking up a massive 70% of the total audience. This is up from 60% for the same period in the previous year. The smallest group of users by age are the 18-24 year olds, taking up 11% of the overall population.

Brands

YouTube was the only brand in the top ten to see any increase in traffic over the month. The user generated video site and catch-up service moved up two places by drawing in an extra 145,000 users (just under 1%).

It was bad news for other brands with four of the top players losing over 1 million users. Hardest hit was Wikipedia, down 9.5% MoM – an actual loss in audience of 1.5 million.

The second most popular online brand in the UK saw the second biggest loss in the top ten. Windows Live dropped nearly 1.5 million users in February, down 5%.

The general loss in users also saw Amazon and Microsoft drop a rank, with the retailing giant down 3.5 million users since November 2010.

Google continued to produce a healthy flow of traffic and remains the number one online destination despite losing 632,000 users over the month.

Newspapers

A similar downturn in users affected the top ten newspaper sites, with only two properties seeing an increase in numbers from the previous month.

London Evening Standard grew by 8%, the biggest jump in the top ten, totalling 799,000 users in February. Newsquest Local Media also attracted more users than the previous month with a 0.3% rise. Although small, this was enough to send the group of Newsquest sites up 20 places overall.

The Sun saw the most significant drop in users, down a massive 25% over the month. The last of News Corporation’s online sites to remain free, The Sun had a fantastic start to the year, seeing an impressive jump in users.

Despite February’s post-Christmas levelling The Sun remained the 4th most popular newspaper site, although it fell 24 places in the overall rankings.

Trinity Mirror Regionals somehow managed to crawl back into the top ten despite shedding 21% of the audience over February.

Search

AOL Search was one of the few search services to benifit from extra traffic in February, enjoying a 14% jump, which helped the site move from 11th place to 7th.

Google continued to stay well ahead of the competition in the search category with three of the company’s search services making the top ten.

Google Search, Image Search and Product Search account for 62% of all the users in the top ten search category combined but all three properties saw a loss over the month.

Worse hit was Google Product search, down by more than 1.1 million users (23.5%). The price comparison service peaked in December with an audience of 5.4 million. BBC Search fell out of the top ten after suffering a 26% YoY drop.

Social Networks

The overall drop in total audience in February even affected the ever-popular world of social networking.

Facebook saw its audience fall for the second month in a row, down by over 500,000 users over February. However, it did remain by far the most popular way to connect with the digital audience, displaying an active reach of 65%. By comparison, LinkedIn has an active reach of 8%.

Despite showing the biggest actual loss over the month, Facebook still pulled in 25 million users across the UK in February, keeping the social networking site in the number one position.

Publishing platform WordPress enjoyed another good month – increasing its unique audience by 666,000 since the start of the year.