UKOM Data Report: February 2012

39.8 million UK users accessed the internet in February, according to data released by online research company UKOM. The UK’s online audience, which peaked in January 2012 with 40.7 million users, saw a slight drop in the month of February, falling by 878,000 people month on month.

60% of internet users fall into the more affluent half of the social grades with 23 million users making up the ABC1s. Out of all the social grades, B has the highest amount of people online with 12.4 million members. At the very top are the As, which make up the smallest percentage in the online population with 2.5 million users. Subscribers can run a UKOM Universe Profile report here.

Brands

The digital world’s top brands were affected by the drop in the UK’s online population with eight of the top 10 seeing a drop in users. February wasn’t kind to Google in particular; the search giant lost just over one million users. Although this loss accounted for just 3.2% of Google’s overall audience.

WindowsLive also struggled, also down one million users. It wasn’t all bad news though; BBC gained 98,000 users and moved up one place in the process. YouTube once again broke through the 20 million user mark and moved up two places to become the fifth most popular brand.

Newspapers

All of the top ten online UK papers took a tumble in February after seeing a great start to the year. Worst affected was The Guardian, down 670,000 users MoM. Despite the loss it remained the second most popular UK newspaper site and held onto five million users.  Mirror.co.uk saw the biggest percentage drop, down 25% (538,000 users) in just one month. MailOnline out-performed the competition once again, bringing in 6.6 million users over February and scoring an active reach of 17%.

Portals

The Virgin Media portal site saw a significant jump in users during February, as the media provider announced plans to double broadband speeds around the country, helping it jump up four places in the top 10. Over the space of one month the site witnessed a 96% increase, resulting in a total of 9.9 million users.

It was fairly bleak news for other portals sites; along with Google and Bing, Ask Search Network didn’t fare too well in February. The search portal lost 1.7 million users, translating to a 13% drop in traffic.