Just when the pundits were indicating that UK Internet access had pretty much hit saturation, new research says that it has grown by 5% in the last year.
The UKOM data indicates that there are nearly 2 million more people online in the UK this year. And whilst youngsters were the early adopters, much of this growth comes from the over 50s.
This graph from Nielsen shows it all:
The total number of people online in the UK stands at 38.8m, up from 36.9m 12 months ago. The over-50s account for 31% of that group.
38% of these new users were men over 50, and another 15% were women in the same age bracket. 14% were women between 12 and 34, whilst 12% were girls between 12 and 20.
What are the over 50s looking at online? It turns out that health, online video and community websites are the big attraction.
Alex Burmaster from UKOM said “This age group have a wide appetite when it comes to the types of sites they are using to supplement the interests and needs they have in the daily lives.
“Consequently, a number of brands across a range of industries, particularly travel, are showing the rest what a valuable medium online is when it comes to reaching a desired audience who haven’t grown up with the Internet.”
And what about those building websites? We don’t survey WebEden’s user ages but anecdotal evidence from the forum and Twitter show that many of our best website builders are 50+.
Do you fall into the 50+ bracket? Have you been online for years, or just arrived? Does your online interests different from your peer group? Leave us a comment below.
Although this blog is mostly about how to make a website, we’ve occasionally published interesting Internet facts and statistics in our web stats channel here on the WebEden blog.
This is for no other reason than we love to be wowed by ‘how big’, ‘how much, ‘how high’ numbers when it comes to the Internet. And of course we all like to fact-boast and appear knowledgeable at dinner parties, right? OK, maybe I should get out more.
Here’s some more stats, this time describing who uses the Internet, and how. Here we go:
*Unsurprisingly, Internet use is on the rise, accessed ‘several times a day’ by 27% of people in 2005 and 38% in 2010.
*Excatly the same percentage of men use it as women – 74%.
*Older people use the Internet less: 93% of 18-29 year olds use it; just 38% of 65 and up do so. 65 is where the drop off comes – 70% of 50 – 64 year olds are online.
*Income level of broadband users are much higher than non-broadband users.
*Internet users are more likely to be graduates (94% of them are online) rather than a high school leaver (39% of whom are online.
*58% of Internet users make use of a desktop rather than a laptop.
*Bloggers tend to be 25 – 44 – just 7% of those less than 25 do it.
*54% of bloggers think they are ‘experts’. Ahem.
*Norway is the highest percetage of its population online.
*Japan has the fastest Internet connections
It’s all summed up in this great info graphic from focus.com
Never again will you be stuck for something to say as the soup is being served. Anyone want to sit by me?
Back in December we talked about whether Christmas was a good time or a bad time for selling online. It all comes down to the type of products you offer. For consumer facing websites selling clothes, gadgets and gifts its boom time. For everyone else it’s a real slowdown.
For WebEden we charted the reducing number of visitors throughout the month.
Back on the 6th of December it was supposed to be the biggest online shopping day of the year. So called ‘Cyber Monday’ was late enough to ensure that everyone was in present buying mood, but early enough to guarantee delivery by Christmas.
Online monitoring firm Hitwise UK revealed that this year Cyber Monday was been eclipsed by online shopping on Boxing day.
The next busiest shopping day was actually 27th December, which beat Cyber Monday into third spot.
Hitwise also showed that Christmas Eve and even Christmas day were busy shopping days too, up by 36% over the previous year. So plenty of people were choosing bargains while the rest of us were guzzling turkey.
The main beneficiaries of this shopping frenzy were high street retailers who sell online, including Tesco, Debenhams, Next and Currys. Those online retailers without an offline presence actually had reduced traffic.
According to Robin Goad at Hitwise UK it’s all about whether or not the websites were heavily promoting a sale. Apparently UK sales related searches were up by 25% in Christmas week.
As for WebEden this year our traffic figure dropped to right down on Christmas day, but made a solid recovery the next. Here’s a traffic graph for the whole Christmas period.
Was your website busy for Christmas week, or did visitors fall away like WebEden’s? Are you having any luck promoting a sale? Leave us a comment below.
I’ve just been looking through some of the blog statistics and I thought you’d be interested in a few of them.
To start with, there have been 239 posts in all, comprising of 121,233 words. We’ve added 647 links and 4,787 images.
You’ve participated quite a bit too! The blog has received 841 comments. Perhaps the most incredible statistic is the number of ‘spam’ comments we’ve had: a whopping 12,268.
We’ve also had some great guest blogs which have been some of the most popular posts.
Its been a strong year for visitors too. The blog has been visited by 18,562 people, who spent an average of 1 minute 58 seconds reading. They looked at 53,679 pages.
Here’s the graph of page views from Google Analytics:
Those spikes that you can see are from when we send a newsletter out.
