Content Sites See 73 Percent More Traffic than Transactional Ones

The Internet is always changing and the way that it's being used has shifted dramatically over the years. New data from Hitwise shows a big change in the popularity of several website categories, with entertainment-related sites now having 73 percent more visitors in the UK than business and other transactional sites.

Robin Goad of Hitwise has shared a couple of charts that summarize the trend over the past three years. He grouped web sites in several categories, with the entertainment sites, like YouTube or BBC's iPlayer, which is only available in the UK, being the most popular, with 12.23 percent of the monthly visits having seen steady growth in the last few years. The second most popular category is made up of social networks and forums, now gathering 10.47 percent of the visits in the UK while also being the fastest growing category, which is no surprise with the huge growth sites like Facebook and Twitter, which is especially popular in the country, have seen recently.

News and media sites, which include traditional news outlets as well as web-only organizations but not blogs, are the only other category to see growth in the past three years, having managed to attract 6.29 percent of the market. At the same time, what Hitwise calls “transactional” sites have all declined, with Business and finance sites seeing a small drop in their share of the visits, though maintaining a significant share of the market at 6.63 percent. A bigger drop was seen by the Shopping and Classifieds category, which still commanded 8.44 percent of the market, and especially by Travel sites.

When grouping the categories together, the content sites versus the transactional sites, the picture is even clearer, with the former enjoying a big surge in popularity, now being 73 percent more visited that the latter. This is even more surprising after, as early as 2006, content sites had 5 percent less visits, having passed transactional sites in popularity in early 2007 and seeing big growth since.