According to the first study from Media Metrix’s MMXI
Europe, Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Online can still claim the number one place in
terms of page views on the German ISP market.
T-Online’s original payment system and its freely accessible service are both favoured by users, each with a coverage of over 50 percent within the representative group and with around 2.8 million visitors in total.
The German portal site of Yahoo! has to settle for third place, despite the overall prominence of American sites on Europe’s newest rank listing. Yahoo! Germany attracting only half the number visitors at 1.4 million and enjoying a
coverage of around 26 percent. Forth place also goes to the American version of the portal, with almost identical view statistics.
MMXI’s report also compiled a table in which the respective national free and fee-based services are summed up, in order to establish the absolute coverage of each particular brand.
T-Online manages to top this table as well, with 3.6 million visits and a
coverage of 67.9 percent, followed by Yahoo! with 1.6 million visitors and a
coverage of 30 percent. AOL is a newcomer to third place, yet still with a
modest 1.5 million page hits and a coverage of almost 29 percent.
According to the managing director of MMXI Europe, Arielle Dinard, the fact that the big
American ISPs enjoy such a strong market position in the most important
European markets, despite the dominance of local providers, is due to their
success in adapting the contents of their web sites to suit the respective
markets.
Using a specialist software package, installed on the computers of
representatively chosen users, MMXI is able to follow the exact surfing
preferences of the user and can then assess this information.