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Top 100 student websites in the UK
June 02, 2009
Yesterday I received a call from Sridhar Venkatapuram of the London Business School asking me about the online behaviour of students in the UK. I mentioned on Twitter that I was pulling a list of the 100 most popular websites amongst UK students, and received a number of requests to publish the list. Well, here it is – but first quick note on methodology.
In order to isolate a sample that consisted primarily of students I looked through the Experian Mosaic profiles to find the types that contained the highest proportion of undergraduates and post-graduates. There were two Mosaic types that particularly stuck out: E33 - Town Gown Transition (defined as “Students and academics mix with young professionals in terraces relatively close to universities”) and E34 - University Challenge (“Undergraduate students living in halls of residence or close to
Universities”). The list below consists of the 100 most visited websites (excluding university homepages) by these two Mosaic groups during the four weeks ending 23/05/2009.
The three most popular categories of websites amongst students were Social Networks, Search Engines and Webmail Services. Education – Reference ranked sixth, while Education – Institutions placed seventh. The fact that the sample was over eight times more likely than an average UK Internet user to visit the latter category reassured me that we’d picked the most relevant Mosaic groups. In fact, the Education – Institution was the category that our student sample most over indexed as visitors to. The next most over-indexed categories were: Animation & Comics, Blogs, Humour, and Education – Reference.
As you would expect, high volume websites top the list; with the positions of Google, Facebook and Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) reflecting their overall popularity amongst the UK online population. However, Google UK is still over represented in the list. In fact, there are 14 Google branded or owned properties in the top 100, all of which over-index with students. In particular, Gmail, Google Book Search UK and Google Scholar UK significantly over-index vs. the general UK population.
After Google, the next most popular online brands amongst students are the BBC and Yahoo!, each of which has nine properties in the list. Again, all of the BBC properties over-index with our sample, particularly iPlayer and the BBC Blog Network. The picture is more mixed for Yahoo!, with three of its properties over-indexing. The next two most popular brands were Microsoft (accounting for seven of the top 100) and News Corporation (six) – and again the picture is more mixed, with some properties over-indexing and some under. Combined, those five companies accounted for 45 of the top 100 sites visited by UK students.
Other key insights from the list:
• 26 of the sites are entertainment focussed, with online video and TV particularly well represented. Despite all the learning, the presence of Perez Hilton illustrates that students aren’t immune to a bit of celebrity gossip.
• There are 20 news and sports sites on the list. Fans of Paul Calf will be reassured to see the Guardian as the most popular newspaper site, although students also over index as visitors to the other popular newspaper sites as well.
• All of the main social networking sites over-index on the list, with the exception of Bebo. Twitter is most over-represented social network amongst students, ranking as the 22nd most popular website overall in our sample.
• There are eights information sites on the list, with Wikipedia, the aforementioned Google properties and Word Reference in particular over-indexing.
• There are only six retailers in the top 100. eBay UK is the most popular, but noticeably under-indexes with students. The most over-indexed are fashion retailers TopShop and ASOS.
Hopefully the list will prove interesting, or at least provoke some debate. I would be interesting to produce similar lists for other demographic groups, for example retired people, families, young professionals, etc., so please feel free to use the comments box below to suggest some other groups you might want similar information on.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 02:30 PM
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In Categories BBC | Blogs | Branding | Celebrities | Demographics | Education | Email | Experian | Fashion | Google | Mosaic lifestyle | News and Media | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | TV | Top UK websites
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Comments
The list is based on the number of visits from those 2 mosaic groups. I've inclided the index for reference so that you can see if the site is 'punching above it weight' with the student population, but it wasn't used to create the rankings.
Posted by Robin Goad | June 2, 2009 03:32 PM
Thanks for this list. I propose active women and seniors...
Posted by Yves Vandeuren | June 2, 2009 03:54 PM
Thanks for the suggestions, Yves. Can you clarify what you mean by 'active women' - are you talking about working women?
Posted by Robin Goad | June 2, 2009 04:04 PM
Thanks for this list, this is interesting. It seems the title however is quite broad as "Top 100 student websites in the UK" seems to imply all students, not just undergraduates, but the results are based on just "Students and academics mix with young professionals in terraces relatively close to universities"" and "Undergraduate students living in halls of residence or close to
Universities". I would be interested to find out the results of a similar survey to include all in full time education, I am sure Facebook's %age of users who are a 'student' would increase dramatically from 1.86% for example and this would make a more representative 'student' list
Posted by Nick T | June 2, 2009 05:06 PM
It would be interesting to see how this maps back to other Mosaic profiles to find linked or similar groups. Define a "profile" for this "Students top 100 sites" based on website class (liberal news, social networking, etc - not sure how you class sites) and index performance. Then do the same for all Mosaic profiles and look for similarities. There may be some, as yet, unknown similarities between profiles - for example, maybe student's behaviour is quite close to some other group, allowing marketers to more cleverly define their target demographic.
Posted by Andy | June 4, 2009 11:44 AM
The result is similar to the top websites in the UK as viewed by the general population.
Posted by George St John | June 9, 2009 01:51 PM
Hi George,
Yes, the top 100 are quite similar as for the overall population, primarily becuase many of the top 100 sites are popular with most groups. However, the index relative to the online population and rankings show that the relative importance of the top sites is quite different for this sample.
For example, Twitter is notably more popular with students, as are BBC properties. On the other hand, Microsoft and Yahoo! properties gnerally under-index. Another areas where there are clear differences are in the retail area.
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | June 10, 2009 01:56 PM
Damn was hoping we would get listed in the top 100! :) oh well maybe next year!
Posted by Will Fealey - FastStudentCash.com | June 10, 2009 04:03 PM
I would be interested to know top websites visited by over 60s. Thanks
Posted by Sian | June 17, 2009 04:50 PM
Are you seriously suggesting that your sample is representative of UK students as a population?
If so you're wrong - if not you're making generalisations from a non-representative sample.
Why bother?
Publicity perhaps?
Posted by Derek Hodge | July 2, 2009 12:34 AM
Derek - that is exactly what we are suggesting. I'm not sure how familar you are with Mosaic, but it uses an extremely rigorous methodology and hundreds of data sources to provide a socio-demographic profile of UK households. I selected the 2 osaic types that contain a very high percentage of students.
Regarding the publicity question - yes, the purpose of this blog is publicise the intersting data that we have within Hitwise and the different ways in which it can be uused. However, the particular list was produced in response to a direct request for thsi data that I received via Twitter and thought would be of interest to a wider audience.
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | July 2, 2009 02:36 PM
Great post, very informative research!
I noticed that all of the listed TOP 100 sites have a general user base. It would be interesting to know how student focused sites faired in your rankings.
Is there a way you could expand the list (e.g. TOP 300) to show the rankings of some of the most popular student focused sites as compared to the rest?
and/or
Create new rankings for sites whose % of visitors from E33 and E34 mosaics are 50% or above?
thanks,
Imo
Posted by Imo Udom | July 9, 2009 12:51 AM
very interesting! I tried to paste to excel to order by index before realising it was an image.
is the index based on # of visits from those demographics vs # of visits from all demographics?
thanks as ever, Robin!
Posted by dan barker | June 2, 2009 03:02 PM