For the fist time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services. As the chart below illustrates, our custom category of the top 25 social networks, which includes Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, compared to 4.98% for Computers and Internet – Email Services, which includes Hotmail; Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, amongst others.
This confirms that social networks are starting to eat into the web-based email providers’ dominance of the internet messaging market. A growing proportion of the UK online population is choosing to communicate with friends via social networks rather than email. We illustrated this recently with regards to the charity website JustGiving, and also highlighted the volume of traffic that Social Networks are sending to retail sites this year in the run up to Christmas. In fact, it’s happening across the board: as the chart below illustrates, social networks now also refer as much traffic to other websites as web-based email services.
It’s interesting to see that age clearly plays a role, with younger Internet users preferring social networks, while older surfers choose email. The graph below illustrates the user-base of Windows Live Mail and Facebook, respectively the most popular web-based email service and social network in the UK.
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 PM
Posted to Social networks
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