Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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August 14, 2007
Market Turmoil Leads Consumers Online but Punters More Interested in Big Brother
Friday the markets went crazy. Now that things are calming down (at least they seem to be) I wanted to look at what impact the turmoil had on UK consumer behaviour online. Friday (10th August) was the busiest day since Budget Day (21st March) for Business Information and Stocks and Shares websites. UK Internet visits to Business Information websites were up 11% Friday compared to Thursday and visits to Stocks and Shares websites were up 13%.
Yahoo! and MSN saw more of their portal traffic divert to their finance sections on Friday as UK consumers clicked through for market updates. UK Internet visits to Yahoo! UK & Ireland Finance were up 19% Friday and MSN Money UK's Internet visits were up 9%. Other fast movers were FT.com with UK Internet visits up 24% and Fool.co.uk up 11%. UK consumers were also searching for information on the markets with the number of search terms that included the words "share price" up 14% last week, "ftse" up 21% and "ftse 100" up 217%.
News and Media traffic also surged but when I looked at the data, the increase appears to be on the back of fantasy football, big brother and other news events rather than the market turmoil. The highest volume non-branded search terms sending visits to News and Media websites last week were "weather forecast", "big brother", "uk weather" and searches for Formula 1 driver "lewis hamilton". Among the highest volume queries, those that saw an increase last week were "lewis Hamilton" up 83% and "madeleine mccann" up 127%.
In fact, whilst bankers were cutting holidays short in response to the market turmoil, our data shows that punters are more interested in Big Brother and Fantasy Football. Last week, the volume of UK internet searches for "big brother" was 49 times higher the volume of searches for "ftse" and searches for "fantasy football" were 10 times higher. In fact, hype around the Premier League and offline promotion of fantasy football caused UK Internet searches for "fantasy football" to soar to their highest level in two years.
Consumer confidence doesn't seem to have been affected by the markets just yet...
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 07:00 AM
Posted to Stocks and Shares
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Comments
It's good to know that in spite of stock market chaos Big Brother still wins out Heather.
This reminded me of the Buzz Index at Yahoo many years ago when search engine activity started to emerge as a way of gauging the pulse of popular culture. I guess the big shift is that now online audiences have swelled to cover the vast majority of us in the UK, these numbers are truely indicative of national behaviour. Just a few years ago the audiences were still too skewed so there was still a sample bias in the data.
Best
Danny
Posted by: Danny Meadows-Klue at August 22, 2007 11:09 AM
