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Social Xmas: Facebook’s busiest day ever, YouTube overtakes Hotmail, Social networks = 10% of UK Internet traffic
December 30, 2008
With all of the focus on the economic downturn and the troubles in the retail sector, it’s easy to forget the continued growth of social networking in the UK. Christmas is traditionally the busiest time of year for social networks, and this festive season the sector achieved three significant new milestones.
Facebook accounts for 1 in 22 UK Internet visits on Christmas Day
On Christmas Day 2007 Facebook reached a peak in traffic that wasn’t surpassed until July 2008. Traffic reached a new high on Christmas Day 2008, when Britain’s most popular social networking site accounted for 1 in every 22 UK Internet visits. With a market share of 4.65% Facebook’s traffic was up 69% on Christmas Day 2007, and it was the second most visited website after Google UK (8.63%).
YouTube overtakes Hotmail
Video site YouTube received more UK Internet traffic than Microsoft Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) for the first time during Christmas week 2008. For the week ending 27/12/08, YouTube accounted for 2.13% of all UK Internet visits compared to 2.11% for Live Mail. During the same week, YouTube was the third most visited website in the UK behind Google UK and Facebook, while Live Mail ranked fourth.
Social networks account for 1 in 10 UK Internet visits
The successes of Facebook and YouTube, along with similar sites, meant that social networks accounted for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits during Christmas week. For the week ending 27/12/08, our Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums category accounted for 10.09% of all UK Internet visits, the first ever time it has passed the 10% threshold. Over the last 12 months traffic to the category has increased by 20%, and it now ranks behind only Entertainment, Search Engines and Shopping and Classifieds in terms of UK Internet visits.
Posted by Robin Goad at 08:00 AM
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In Categories Christmas | Social networks | Video
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Comments
Hi Robin - thanks for the comment.
The Computers and Internet - Social Networking and Forums category icludes all social media sites, including forums, but not blogs (or Wikipedia, which is included in our Education category). Here is a list of the top 10 (of 7,356) sites in the category last week:
1. Facebook (35.4%)
2. YouTube (19.3)
3. Bebo (9.7%)
4. MySpace (5.4%)
5. Yahoo! Answers (1.1%)
6. Club Peguin (0.7%)
7. Nasza Klasa (0.7%)
8. Windows Live Home (0.6%)
9. Tagged (0.6%)
10 BBC H2G2 (0.6%)
Blogs have their won category. Traffic to blogs does spike over Christmas, but on Christmas Eve rather than the day itself. You can find more analysis of the UK blogosphere on an earlier post here:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/06/uk_blog_traffic_reaches_all_time_high.html
Regards, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | December 31, 2008 12:23 PM
Interesting info, but are there actual numbers available - 10,000 or 100,000 or so on? I'm always slightly sceptical of stories that don't give hard figures.
Posted by Craig McGill | January 8, 2009 10:23 AM
u right special days get more traffic for targeted keywords
Posted by seema bhatia | February 3, 2009 02:37 PM
Robin - does the "Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums" category include blogs in general? i.e. is it a generic 'social media' category or is it more arbitrarily specific than that?
Would be good to know your thoughts on what this actually means – are people spending more and more time in social media? Or am I getting slightly ahead of myself here?
Posted by Robin Grant | December 31, 2008 01:53 AM