14 DAY TRIAL // Britons are heavy Internet users. As a study conducted by Nielsen Online shows, between June 2007 and May 2008, the average number of minutes spent monthly by the U.K citizens on the Internet surpassed 33 million. The leader, with 2,626 minutes and 7.8% of the market share, is MSN Messenger. The first runner up, getting 1,630 minutes per month and 4.8% of the share, is the famous auction website eBay. It is followed by Facebook, with 1,406 minutes and 4.2 of a hundred users who visit it.
The other websites or applications that were included in the top 10 were one search engine - Google Search (the 4th place), two email services - Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail (the 5th and 10th place respectively), two media players - Windows Media Player and iTunes (positioned on the 6th and 9th place respectively), a video network application - YouTube (placed 7th) and another social network - Bebo, situated on the 8th spot.
These ten account for more than 30% of the total time Britons are allocating to online activities. Alex Burmaster, Internet Analyst at Nielsen Online, draw a couple of conclusions regarding the users' behavior and the market tendencies: "This means that the thousands of other sites are competing for a much smaller share of the pie than they might think. If you also take into account that Britons aren't spending significantly more time online, yet there are more sites springing up all the time, it shows how increasingly competitive and cut-throat the online sector is becoming."
The study also took into consideration the fastest increase in minutes registered by various websites. Since May 2007, Facebook had a 387% rate of increase, the number of minutes Britons spent socializing on the network in May 2008 being of 2.249 million, in comparison with the 462 million registered at the beginning of the study. YouTube followed suit, with an increase rate of 50%, while Second Life, the 3D virtual gamers' world, ranked third. Google Search, Google Maps, Wikipedia, ASDA, iTunes, Club Penguin and Veoh were also present in the top 10.
"Whilst the social media wave continues to have the biggest impact on Internet behavior levels, it's important not to forget that some of online's more traditional sectors continue to perform well. The representation of sectors such as games, search and retail - through sites such as Second Life, Google and ASDA respectively - show the health and vitality of the entire online arena," added the analyst for Nielsen Online.