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Search Engines Larger than Adult Sites - Stats from London Internet Peeps Event

January 30, 2007

Last night I gave a two minute talk at one of Robert Loch's Internet Peeps events. The topic that I, and 15 others, were asked to speak to was "The Future of the Internet". A lofty topic...

To get a sense for where things are going, I first looked at the growth and decline of the categories of websites that we track, based on the share of UK internet visits each attracts.

Categories in decline:

  • Adult websites are down 20% in market share of UK internet visits comparing December 2005 and December 2006.
  • Gambling websites are down 11%.
  • Music websites are down 18%

Keep in mind, we are reporting the share of visits. Of all UK internet visits in our sample of 8.43 million UK internet users, what percentage is going to Adult websites versus other categories.

Growth categories:

  • Net Communities and Chat websites are up 34%.
  • News and Media websites are up 24%.
  • Search Engines are up 22%.
  • Food and Beverage are up 29%.
  • Education (driven by Wikipedia) is up 18%.
  • Business and Finance up 12%.

As the title of this post indicates, search engines have overtaken Adult as the largest category, based on share of UK internet visits. This happened in October. In December, the gap was just 1% between the two categories, but search engines continue to grow and adult continues to decline, so the gap will likely widen.

The pioneers - the first industries to flourish online - were adult and gambling. These categories are seeing their share of the market decline. I asked the audience whether adult and gambling could be a bellwether for the future. Can we predict what the next big thing is for the internet by looking at where Adult and Gambling traffic is going? Much of the activity in Second Life is reported to be "adult". George Berkowski from BT pointed out that much of the Adult traffic has moved to peer to peer networks, such as BitTorrent. Both offer interesting ideas for where we are headed.

Among the growth categories, the rise of social networking is something that everyone expected. It is no surprise that community sites such as MySpace, Bebo and YouTube are growing rapidly and fundamentally changing the relationship that businesses have with their customers. The rise of more traditional industries such as News and Media, Business and Finance and Food and Beverage is perhaps more interesting.

The growth of News and Media is not just about online news sources and news aggregators. Print Media websites are keeping pace with the parent category. Within the Business and Finance category, Stocks and Shares and Banks and Financial Institutions are leading the growth. Finally, all of the sub-categories we track within the Food and Beverage category are growing rapidly, including Brands up 17%, Lifestyle and Reference up 37% and Restaurants and Catering up 34%.

These more traditional industries witnessed the shifts in the music industry and are perhaps adapting more quickly to maintain a direct relationship with their audience.

Trends in Points of Access
The stats I didn't have time to share in my two minute slot (which was likely more like five) were about points of access. Google accounted for 25% of upstream traffic to all categories of websites in December. This means that one in four UK internet visits to websites came from Google. The #2 source was Hotmail, accounting for 3%, and #6 was MySpace accounting for 2%.

  • Search Engines (including Google) accounted for 35% of upstream visits in December, up 13% year on year.
  • Web-based email services accounted for 7%, up 16% year on year.
  • Net Communities and Chat accounted for 7% of upstream visits, up 64% year on year.
  • News and Media accounted for 5% up 26% year on year.

I believe that clickstream data is a better indicator or future behaviour, whilst visits are a backward looking metric. Search is not going away and networks will be increasingly important. Antony Mayfield, among others, is an advocate of the idea that the future of search is about networks. The trends in points of access support that notion.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 12:25 PM | (5) | (0)
In Categories Search Engines

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Comments

I have one question: According to its website and recent advertising campaign, the Telegraph is the UK's most popular "quality newspaper" website. However, a quick comparison on Alexa shows that the Guardian receives many, many more visitors both in the UK and outside - so what's going on? Is the Guardian not technically a "quality" paper any more? (Note: I'm not connected in any way to either paper, I'm just curious!)

Posted by Jo | January 31, 2007 12:44 AM

Jo, Thanks for your comment and question. The Telegraph ad is based on their website (www.telegraph.co.uk) being the #1 Print Media website from September to December 2006 based on share of UK internet visits. Hitwise reports on visits, not unique visitors and so our rankings cannot be compared to Alexa or other services that report on unique visitors. I should also mention that we report visits by market, in this case for the UK.

If you're interested in more detailed information on how we collect our data, there is a detailed description of our methodology on our website. Otherwise, I'd be happy to answer any further questions.

Posted by Heather Hopkins | February 1, 2007 12:06 AM

What (if anything) can be learned from this "points of access" report when it comes to emails. Example: with the stat about 3 percent of traffic from hotmail - Is this saying "3 percent of traffic is coming from a hotmail page" (maybe an ad banner on hotmail) or "3 percent of traffic is coming from links in emails that people are reading while in hotmail"? I'm curious to know if hitwise has any research to identify how many site visits come from hyperlinks in emails. Most people check their email every day. Its highly likely that people start their surfing with a link in an email - Any feedback much appreciated. thanks

Posted by Andy Hulse | March 6, 2007 08:25 AM

Andy, Good question. You are right - our data is showing visits from an web-based email domain, such as www.googlemail.com or www.hotmail.com to another website. We don't distinguish between visits from a hyperlink in an email and clicks on banners - as well as natural flow of traffic as Hotmail may be set as a homepage for active users.

We might be able to do this through bespoke reporting using our Conversions Technology. This allows us to get deeper down into the URL string and we might be able to pick up differences that way. If you want to explore further, let me know and I'll put you in touch with someone who can provide more details on that.

Thanks again for your comment and question,
Heather

Posted by Heather Hopkins | March 8, 2007 12:09 AM

I would say this may also be true on a larger scale as search engines are becoming really big in the US as well

Posted by Larry Jones | May 29, 2007 06:58 PM

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