Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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August 05, 2008
Facebook overtakes eBay to become third most visited website
Facebook became the third most visited website in the UK during July, overtaking eBay UK on the way. As the chart below illustrates, the social network received 2.75% of all UK Internet visits last month, equivalent to one in every 36. Facebook is also closing gap with Windows Live Mail (Hotmail), currently the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK.
A couple of caveats here, the first related to eBay UK. We categorize both eBay.com and eBay Motors separately, although 26% of people visiting the former end up at the UK site, while the latter currently receives 87% of its traffic from eBay UK. The second relates to Windows Live Mail, which hasn’t suddenly shot up the rankings! In fact, the webmail service changed its URL structure last year and traffic to the new URL only normalized from the start of this year.
Both Facebook and eBay are addictive sites with loyal fans, so I thought it would be interesting to compare the two sites’ demographic profiles. Facebook visitors are more likely to be female, are younger (it receives more visits from people aged between 18 and 34), and are more likely to live in London and the South East. Looking at the Experian Mosaic Lifestyle profiles for the 4 weeks ending 02/08/2008, Facebook experiences a swing in its favour from three groups: Urban Intelligence (E - ‘Young, single and mostly well-educated, these people are cosmopolitan in tastes and liberal in attitudes’), Symbols of Success (A – ‘People with rewarding careers who live in sought after locations, affording luxuries and premium quality products’) and Welfare Borderline (F – ‘People who are struggling to achieve rewards and are mostly reliant on the council for accommodation and benefits’).
Posted by Robin Goad at 04:00 PM
Posted to Demographics | Email | Men | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Women
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