According to research by Nielsen, the two most heavily used web brands are Facebook and MSN/Windows Live. They account for almost 11 billion of the 48 million minutes Britons spend online. Coming in third is Google and fourth place is eBay with total UK users spending a whopping 2,560 minutes and 1,978 minutes respectively on these sites in April 2009.
Facebook is one of the major reasons people are spending more time online. People in the UK spend a total of 22 hours and 20 minutes online which is up on 34% a year ago. (April 2008 – April 2009) However, facebook recorded people spending 3.8billion more minutes in April this year than April 2008
The most heavily used web brands are those in the communication and entertainment industry. Hotmail’s instant messenger has people hooked for hours online, chatting away to friends or sending work files to colleagues. YouTube is the entertainment channel for most users online, allowing those to search for quirky videos or funny clips.
The 10 most heavily used brands online are the following:
1 Facebook
2 MSN/Windows Live
3 Google
4 eBay
5 Yahoo!
6 AOL Media Network
7 BBC
8 YouTube
9 Microsoft
10 Apple
Ok so this week, for those that missed it, there was some news regarding google indexing news publishers sites.
We all know that if you do not want google to index your website, you simply write in the code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
But for some reason the news publishers think that all their content is going to be indexed by the search engine. According to other blogs, news publishers want to charge google for access to their sites. They want google to pay them to index their site. But of course this will not happen. They know they can block the crawler easily.
Search engines have always checked for permissions before crawling through pages from a web site. Webmasters, including news publishers, are aware and use the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to tell search engines whether or not their sites, or a web page, can be crawled.
The google giant is in the news again this week, for launching the Chrome operating system (OS) for the mobile.
This is separate from Android and Google Chrome OS is aimed for those who tend to spend most of their time on line. It will power all computers, from small netbooks to desktop systems.
A company having more than one operating system, is not unheard of. Afterall, Apple has three OSes including Mac, iphone and ipod.
Google first launched the chrome browser in September last year and now has over 30 million users. Now they want to bring chrome into an operating system and I have no doubt they will succeed in this area.
Google is performing well in the search area where it became famous. According to Hitwise, google is the top search engine with 74% market share week ending June 27th. This is up from last year’s 69%. Since my last blog posting here, Bing.com which only went live last month, has seen an increase in market share from 3.4% in the beginning of June to 6.63% by the end. Not bad for a company entering an already saturated market place.
There have also been changes in the keyword field. People are typing in longer search queries.
Longer search queries have increased in popularity over the past year, on average searches of five to more than eight words in length have increased 8% from a year ago. Where there are searches of eight or more words, they have seen an increase of 16%. SEO experts be aware – the shorter search queries of one to four words long decreased by 2%. So next time you are thinking of bidding on keywords, think more along the lines of key phrases and insert these into your meta data.
If you work in digital and online marketing or this is an area you would like to get into, I recommend you visit the “free” trade shows in London.
Yesterday and today, the Online Marketing Show is on at Kensingston Oympia. It is free to enter if you register online www.onlinemarketingshow.co.uk
With over 50 exhibitors, free workshop arenas and pay per click advice centre, this is one show not to be missed.
I recommend going to the free workshops. There was a very interesting workshop on Twitter yesterday by Immediate Future. They discussed the hype of Twitter and how everyone is getting onthe bandwagon but not always to great effect. Some companies are not thinking about their Twitter strategy and so are appearing confused and sending mixed signals.
The show is a great place to meet people in the digital marketing market. There were a number of different media agencies, market research companies, print and promotional organisations. So if you are looking for a new agency to work with, you can meet people in person instead of trawling through the internet.
Social networking sites | Jo Turnbull | 
July 26, 2009 7:55 pm | 
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