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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America
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How Canadians Spend Their Time Online
May 27, 2009
We recently launched Hitwise Canada and in my first post using our Canadian data, I wanted to take a high level view of what my fellow Canadians are doing online and how that compares to their US and UK counterparts. The largest category in Canada, based on share of Internet visits is Search Engines. Hitwise categorises websites into over 165 industry categories.Search Engines came out on top, capturing 14.58% of Canadian Internet visits in April, followed by Social Networking and Forums and Entertainment.
The following chart shows the share of visits going to the 15 most popular parent categories.
(NB - I have used parent categories except for Computers and Internet, where I have used the sub-categories Search Engines, Social Networking, Portal Frontpages and Forums and Email Services.)
Search Engines attract a much larger share of visits in Canada than in the US or UK. Search Engines account for a 53% larger share of Canadian internet visits compared to the US and 22% larger than the UK. Social Networks, Entertainment (in particular YouTube) and web based email are also much more popular (as measured by share of Internet visits) in Canada than in the UK and US. Conversely, Adult and Shopping and Classifieds attract a much smaller share of visits in Canada than in either the UK or US.
The following table lists the top 5 categories for each of these markets. Notice that Adult and Shopping and Classifieds don't appear among the top 5 categories in Canada. Adult comes in at #6 and Shopping and Classifieds at #8 based on share of Canadian internet visits in April.
Search Engines Account for One Third of Upstream Visits
Search Engines are the largest category in terms of visits and unsurprisingly are also the largest source of upstream visits to websites in Canada. In April, 33% of visits to All Categories of websites came directly from a search engine. Social Networks and Entertainment websites were the second and third largest sources of traffic, accounting for 11% and 10% of upstream visits respectively.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 05:02 PM
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Comments
Leo, Thanks for the reminder that this data is new and not everyone is familiar with "how we do it".
Here's a link to our methodology description:
http://heatherhopkins.wordpress.com/
In short, we are reporting anonymous and aggregated internet usage data on over 100,000 Canadians. The data is collected from opt-in panels and ISPs. The data is representative of the Canadian population as a whole - all regions (and languages).
Let me know if you need further clarification.
Thanks, Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | June 5, 2009 08:22 AM
Social Media beats eMail by far. Compared to statistics few years ago only very few would've believed that coming.
Posted by Tobias | June 8, 2009 05:25 AM
Hi Heather,
Where can I get more data on what has been the top 5 categories in the U.S. over the past year? Any time frame, for that matter, would do.
Thanks, Rij
Posted by Rij | July 17, 2009 12:19 AM
Hi,
Maybe I missed it somewhere, but how many were surveyed in this 'Canadian data' analysis, and what regions of the country were surveyed - did it consider urban and rural experieinces? It would also be interesting too to see where online activity was happening in terms of setting,re. at home, in public libraries, offices, etc.?
Cheers,
Leo
Posted by Leo | June 4, 2009 12:24 PM