Shopping sites are still among the traffic leaders, despite investor concerns
about the viability of e-tail.
Web traffic figures for July show that Internet shopping sites are continuing
to pull in hordes of consumers – in fact 42 percent of home surfers visited
e-commerce sites last month.
The figures are from Web audience measurement service Nielsen/NetRatings’ July global
Internet index.
“Despite wide-spread investor concerns about the viability of e-commerce,
shopping sites are pulling in enormous traffic, showing the global appeal and
swelling potential of shopping on the Internet,” said David Day, director of
analytics at ACNielsen eRatings.com.
“Shopping sites attracted nearly 52 million visitors in July, three million
more than in June, accounting for 42 percent of the active Internet audience
last month,” Day said. “Content-rich e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay
are leading this trend by attracting large global audiences and generating
large numbers of page views. One in 10 people online in July went to eBay,
reflecting its global significance.”
July results showed Yahoo! with a leading global position, attracting an
audience of 66 million individuals, followed by AOL, with an audience of 62
million and MSN, with an audience of 50 million.
In addition to shopping sites, the categories of portals and search engines
and telecom and Internet services ranked high in unique audience and percent
of the active audience reached in July.
Just how big is the audience out there? NetRatings said that in July, the
online universe — the number of people with Internet access — grew 4.5
percent over June figures, rising to 216 million people in July from 207
million people across Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand,
Singapore, the UK and the U.S. in June. Similarly, the number of people
active on the Internet in July increased 4.5% to 122 million, which equates
to 56 percent of those with Internet access.
Nielsen//NetRatings is a service provided by ACNielsen eRatings.com (a
venture between ACNielsen Corp.,
and Nielsen Media Research.