[Sydney, AUSTRALIA] Australian Web surfers are yet to commit to favorite sites, unlike users in the more developed U.S. market, according to Nielsen/NetRatings‘ May report. Women, in particular, are yet to find sites with real sticking power, the research indicates.
While U.S. home users are narrowing their list of regularly visited sites, non-U.S. home users remain open to a wide range of offerings. “Americans visited an average of only 10 sites in the past month,” said Sean Kaldor, vice president of e-commerce, NetRatings. “By contrast, even though surfers in other countries consistently spent less time online, they visited up to twice as many sites. For example, Internet users in the UK went to 16 sites while New Zealanders hit a whopping 19 sites. In countries where dominant market leaders have yet to evolve, consumers still practice window shopping on a much more pervasive basis than in the U.S.” The average Australian surfer viewed 15 sites.
Men continue to dominate Internet usage outside the U.S., according to the data. May figures from Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom show the demographic split remains weighted towards men, with a slight weight towards females in the U.S.
The widest split was in the UK, where 60.9 percent of the May audience was male and in Singapore, with 57.6 percent of the audience. By contrast, in the U.S., some 50.8 percent of users were female. Males across all markets also spent between two and three hours longer than females surfing in May. In Australia 54.9 percent of users were male.
“The demographic split in the Internet audience in the U.S. has evened out over the past 18 months,” said Kaldor. “The female audience in the U.S. is primarily visiting shopping sites such as jcpenny.com and spiegel.com, home sites such as hgtv.com or general interest sites like oprah.com,” he claimed.
“Outside the U.S., the female audience is still primarily visiting portals like ninemsn.com.au in Australia, or msn.com in New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. Marketers looking to target female audiences can interpret this
activity to mean females outside the U.S. are still searching for sites they can visit and re-visit for information pertinent to their daily lives,” said Kaldor.
