Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Gasta Tech Update : Hitwise United Kingdom Newsletter

Hitwise United Kingdom Newsletter - August, 2010

Facebook accounts for 1 in 6 UK page views, but is it reaching saturation point?

Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK: in June it accounted for 7.14% of all UK Internet visits and over half (54.48%) of all visits to a social networking websites. In terms of total visits it continues to trail Google UK (9.59% market share in June) and, as previously highlighted, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. However, using the measure of total page views rather than visits, Facebook is way ahead. The social network accounted for 16.73% of UK page views during June. In other words: 1 in every 6 Internet pages viewed in the UK was a Facebook page.

Facebook
continues to grow around the world (during July 2010 it reached half a billion registered users) and there is no doubt that it leads the social networking pack in the UK. However, with 26m British users already, when will it start to reach saturation point? Facebook's market share of UK page views has trebled over the last five years, but growth has slowed significantly over the last six months. During July 2010 there was a slight decline in share, but this may well be down to seasonality (the August / September back to school / college / university period is significant for Facebook).

Another metric is average time spent on the site, a key metric for user engagement on social networks. Facebook has a very high average session time (almost half an hour) but, this has also stabilised over the last six months after increasing rapidly during the site's ascendency. Clearly Facebook is not losing traffic in the UK, but do these stats point to a stabilisation? The rapid period of the site's growth is now probably over in the UK, but does that mean Facebook has reached saturation point?


Fast Movers
Clearance Auctions @ Comet - www.clearance-comet.co.uk


UK Internet traffic to www.clearance-comet.co.uk, Comet's online auction site, has increased 2-fold from June to July this year. Moving up the ranks 2579 positions to #2,236 amongst all websites during July, the majority of traffic to Comet Auctions came from Google UK (35.8%) followed by Moneysavingexpert.com (8.7%), eBay UK (5.0%) and Comet (4.3%). The top non-branded search terms sending traffic to the site for the same period were, 'built in ovens electric' (0.24%), 'auctions' (0.21%) and 'american style fridge freezers' (0.17%). Notably 99% of the online auction site's traffic comes from organic search.

1 in every 100 UK Internet searches Sky Sports related
With the first Barclays Premier League matches taking place during the weekend of August 14 and 15th, the football season is now truly underway. As you would expect, UK Internet visits to key football related websites increased significantly during the week ending 15/08/2010: the Official Fantasy Premier League site by 186%, Sky Sports by 15%. There was also a 12% increase in traffic to BBC Sport, but it has yet to reach the same level of traffic it experienced during the World Cup.

All of the three sites mentioned above ranked amongst the top 100 most visited in the UK for the w/e 15/08/2010, with BBC Sport in 13th position and Sky Sports at number 15. Joining them in the top 100, in 70th position, was the Sky Digital TV Shop, the place where people go to either purchase Sky TV or upgrade their packages. The site is most popular in the North East, although Walsall is the individual postal area that currently most over-indexes in terms of traffic. This perhaps reflects the fact that there are four teams from West Midlands (Aston Villa, West Brom, Birmingham City, Wolves) competing in the top flight of English football this season - the first time this has happened for 27 years.

The main driver for all this traffic was clearly the demand for the Sky Sports channels, and searches for the terms 'sky sports' and 'sky sports football' increased by 38% and 22% respectively over the same period. These were the two most popular of 3,700 different ways in which people searched for the channels during the week ending 15/08/2010. Aggregating all of these together using Hitwise's new broad matching tool, shows that all of these variations accounted for 1% of all UK searches during this period - i.e. 1 in every 100 searches in the UK was related to Sky Sports.



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