As a regular guest blogger, Alex shares some of his insights from the Nielsen Online research tools to help unpack the behaviour of online audiences. Nielsen has been tracking online audiences since the mid nineties and their data helps unpack where people go on the web, how they interact with sites, and how firms convert that energy into commercial returns.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Display advertising is in rude health. The first eight months of 2008 (up to the end of August) saw over 250,000 display advertising campaigns run in Europe, by over 60,000 different advertisers.
Since the beginning of the year, acknowledging a seasonality factor, pretty much every Western European country has experienced a growth in the number of advertisers running display campaigns during the course of the month. This is particularly the case in the Nordic countries where Norway almost doubled (88%) the number of display advertisers from 766 in January 2008 to 1,439 in September 2008. Sweden experienced an 85% growth from 923 to 1,711 whilst Denmark went from 895 to 1,434 – a 60% increase.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
UK
Sports is a hugely popular online category in the UK with almost 40% (13 million people) of Britons online visiting a sports website in December 2008. BBC Sport is, far and away, the most popular sports site with around five and a half million British visitors – three times that of its nearest rival, Sky Sports.
Seven of the ten most popular sites are general sports sites with the other three all concerning football. Whilst Premium TV does cover a few different sports, the lion’s share of its audience comes from the websites of the numerous football sites it publishes as part of its deal with the Football League – the second tire league behind the Premiership. Interestingly, it does outperform the official site of the Premier League by a factor of two – garnering almost 1.7 million Unique UK Visitors compared to almost 800,000 for premierleague.com. The other football site that makes the top 10 is the official club website of Liverpool FC.
The sports category leans slightly towards a male audience (making up 57% of the audience) but less so than most other countries. However, like many other countries the 18-34 year old age group is the dominant audience, accounting for over one in every three visitors to sports sites.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
The wide-ranging use of the phrase ‘online video’ implies a simple coherent entity. Of course, everything needs a moniker but online video is an incredibly diverse ecosystem in terms of what’s on offer, who’s using it and when.
From an ad format perspective, clients and agencies have recently had some help on making sense of this new medium, with the IAB’s set of industry-wide standards. However, when it comes to online viewer behaviour most are still in the dark – for example “short-form for the young, long-form for the old” is one I’ve heard frequently. MySpace Videos and YouTube are predominantly ‘short-form’ video whilst the iPlayer and 4oD would be ‘long-form’.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Smartplanet.com is the latest online attempt to tap into the ‘green’ movement. Coming from CNET Networks, the site focuses on comparing ethical and sustainable products.
The site is well laid out and looks like the people behind it certainly know what they’re talking about. It’s not just limited to comparing products – be it organic foods or environmentally friendly cars – but is essentially a portal containing a variety of useful information on ethical living.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Over the last year YouTube replaced Wikipedia as the UKs most popular social media website. Over 10.4 million Britons visited YouTube in January, or, one in every three Britons online. However, most telling was that half of the ten fastest growing social media sites during the last year were video-related. Whilst the majority of the most popular social media sites are the networks, such as Facebook, the fastest movers point to video being the biggest star of the 2008 social media scene.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
How all UK Internet time is spent provides an excellent overall picture from which to develop a more focused strategy in regards to targeting consumers online.
Despite the current fixation with how to advertise successfully in social networking and video media, together they still only account for around as much time as the most engaging UK Internet sector – Instant Messaging. IM accounts for 12% of all UK Internet time or, if one condensed all UK Internet time into one hour, seven minutes of it would be spent instant messaging.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
If it goes ahead, the Microsoft and Yahoo merger would be one of the major events in the history of the Internet and a credible attempt to challenge the domination of Google.
Whilst the Google suite of websites (visited by 274 million people globally – 80% of people online) is marginally more popular than Microsoft’s (262 million – 76%) and significantly more than Yahoo!’s (191 million – 56%) it is increasing the gap. From December 2006 to December 2007, Google’s global audience grew by 18%, double that of Microsoft (9%) and almost three times that of Yahoo!’s growth (7%).
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Over 85 percent of the world’s online population has used the Internet at some point to make a purchase. Globally, more than half of Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month.
When Nielsen conducted its first global survey into Internet shopping trends two years ago, approximately one in ten of the world’s population (627 million people) had shopped online. Within two years, this number has increased by approximately 40 percent (to 875 million).
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Between them, the thirty leading video and TV streaming websites attracted almost 13 million Britons in December 2007 – almost 40% of the UK Internet population. This is a 70% growth in audience numbers since December 2006 and highlights how well the online video sector is doing; the Internet audience itself grew by ‘just’ 14% across the same period.
So what types of video are proving popular; what are people watching and what are they linking to? The latter part points to the issue of ‘virality’ and measures the most popular videos in terms of links – as opposed to straightforward views. This is a key point for advertisers and publishers when it comes to understanding the holy grail of marketing – what makes people actually generate word-of-mouth.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Public Relations should already own word-of-mouth. PR people were the first ones to really understand the value in measuring consumer-generated media online and the impact person-to-person conversations could have on a brand or issue. Word-of-mouth (WOM) also fitted nicely into the PR discipline, being based on trust, mutual relationships and, often, influential people.
However, PR didn’t end up dominating WOM. A few cutting-edge PR firms took it seriously but, overall, the industry coasted and other marketing disciplines caught up. However, it’s not too late for PR to claim the growing budgets now materialising but it is dependent on a shift in thinking and approach.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Word of mouth media is coming of age. ‘Social’ content, as a rival to ‘professional’ content, has two key implications for media and advertisers. (I caveat my labelling of ‘social’ and ‘professional’ in the knowledge that the former can be of a higher standard than the latter.)
Not only does ‘social’ content provides competition to ‘professional’ content for the eyes and ears of consumers but it crucially provides an alternative and unadulterated, point of view. What you might call the unvarnished truth. It’s not just how much is being said, but what is actually being said. Whilst this isn’t revelatory to the follower of the social media phenomenon the degree to which socially created content is starting to overshadow the professional version probably is.
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Our recent announcement promoting total time as the key user engagement metric, over more traditional measures like the page view, has created a lot of buzz. Historically, the page view has been the currency of online advertising, so, naturally, publishers have been asking what the shift to total time means for them.
New technologies make the page view a less relevant guide of how users are behaving online. These technologies - such as Rich Internet Applications (e.g. AJAX), Flash and streaming (content and audio/video) – mean users consume less content through successive reloaded pages of ‘static’ content.
Continue reading "How time changes the page-view landscape" »
By Alex Burmaster | European Internet Analyst | Nielsen Online
Much has been debated over the last month about the state of the social networks in the UK, particularly the “Big 3” – MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Conjecture has centred on who’s the biggest, who’s growing the fastest and who’s really using them – so it would be useful to set a few things straight.
So, who is the biggest? In the UK, this is still very much MySpace. An April Unique Audience of 6.8 million makes MySpace almost twice as popular as Bebo, who had 3.6 million. Facebook’s 2.7 million Unique Visitors means, at current growth rates, Bebo is more likely to be caught by Facebook than to overtake MySpace. Over the last six months, Facebook’s audience has grown by a whopping 502% compared to a still very healthy 33% for Bebo and 30% for MySpace. In context, the active UK Internet population has grown by just under 7% in the same period.
