Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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It could be because MSN is the default home page for Internet Explorer and "older" less-technically savvy people aren't aware of how to change this page (or use an alternative browser), so hence more older people have MSN as their home page. So, does MSN's home page have a similar demographic as the video page?

Ed, Interesting question. I looked at Hitwise data and found that in the past four weeks, MSN UK's portal homepage in fact skews slightly toward a younger audience, over-indexing relative to the online population among 18-25 year olds (by 15%) and under-indexing among silver surfers (55+ age group) by 11%.

So it would seem that the 55+ age group is more likely to visit the MSN UK Video site after MSN UK than younger visitors.

I welcome other comments/feedback on this.

Thats interesting. Perhaps its because the "silver surfers" are less aware of whats "out there", so are less likely to type www.youtube.com in their address bar and are more likely to explore the portal they're given as their home page.

I know Rupert Murdoch has said that he believes (I'm not sure if hes remotely qualified) that portals are not the way his users want things - they know the sites they like. (Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/20/murdoch_portals_myspace_china/)

I guess hes talking about younger users as thats very much the target of MySpace, so this could explain that.

Younger users are also more likely to be discussing websites with their friends than older users - I can't see my parents going to a party and discussing MSN Videos. At the same time, sites like YouTube and Google Video allow linking of videos into blogs etc - I'm sure that these have a demographic skewed towards younger users. Obviously these videos are watermarked and provide advertising for the sites.

I've never heard anyone discussing MSN appart from as in MSN Messenger. In fact I bet many people aren't even aware that there is anything else to MSN appart from the Messenger! In the US it appears to be a different story though, with AIM being more popular than the UK.

Out of interest, can you tell how many people start their browsing (i.e. have their home page) at msn.co.uk? I'm not sure how you gather these stats, but anyone with a default IE home page will have it set to http://www.microsoft.com/isapi/redir.dll?prd=ie&pver=6&ar=msnhome which will redirect to msn.co.uk... I bet theres a skewed demographic involved there.

Ed, Thanks for the follow up. You might be interested in these statistics I pulled this morning when looking into this further. I pulled off the top 5 categories visited by the 55+ age group based on volume of visits and concentration of visits.

By volume, silver surfers are most likely to visit: Computers & Internet, Search Engines, Adult
Shopping and Classifieds and Business and Finance. I compared this to the categories visited by 18-24 year olds and there were two differences - Adult was further down the list for silver surfers (ranking 2nd among 18-24 year olds) and Business and Finance was replaced by Entertainment (which includes gaming sites).

The top categories based on percentage of visitors from silver surfers were: Travel - Cruises, Lifestyle - Family, Business & Finance - Stocks and Shares, Business & Finance - Utilities and News and Media - Weather. Each of these receive more than one quarter of their visits from silver surfers.

The top sites based on volume of visitors from silver surfers in the past four weeks were Google UK, MSN Hotmail, Orange, Ebay UK, and Google. For 18-24 year olds it was Google UK, eBay UK, MSN UK and MySpace.

I find it really interesting that MSN UK ranks ahead of MySpace in the volume of visits from 18-24 year olds. The reason for this is volume. MSN UK received more than twice the share of UK internet vists last week, as compared with MySpace. MySpace received 34% of its visits from 18-24 year olds compared with 20% for MSN UK. Because MSN UK is a higher volume site, it received a higher volume of visits from 18-24 year olds.

Also, the UK portals for Yahoo! and MSN both skew slightly young, both over-representing with the 18-24 year olds and under-representing with silver surfers.

As for your other question - in our syndicated service we report on the main URL and aggregate visits up to that main URL (i.e. uk.msn.com). In bespoke reporting we can isolate specific sections of a site and in some cases specific URLs. As you might expect, there is a fee for this. Please do let us know if you'd like to explore this further.

Interesting to note the difference in time spent per visit for Google.com and Google.co.uk was so large. I wonder if this is because the .co.uk version is giving more tailored UK orientated material.

This is really interesting. How has this changed over time? Is there a lot of churn in the popularity of sites?

Tom, YouTube overtook Google Videos in the UK in February and has been climbing ever since in market share of visits. In March 2006, You Tube had just less than double the market share of UK visits compared with Google Video. In September, that gap had risen to 4x.