Yet another interesting summary on the state of the Net for Comscore and the penetration of the internet across various different countries in Europe.
It’s not really a precise science to look at the numbers in isolation, as the relative populations have to be taken into account. Looking just at visitors The Netherlands has the highest internet penetration of any of the countries under scrutiny at 72%. Ireland lies #12 with a 535 penetration. If we were to allow to merge this figure with another from Social Bakers it renders an interesting statistic. The latter suggest that there are 2.089m Facebook users in Ireland – therefore it could be argued that 88% or Irish internet users are registered with Facebook.
The UK spend 38.2 hours a month in the ‘net Austria the least at 15.1 hour. The UK spending two and a half times more time online that Austria. The Irish are tending towards the bottom at 21.5 hours. Our engagement is proportionally lower than other European countries
| Visitors (000) (%) | Rank | Average Hours per Visitor | Average Pages per Visitor | ||||
| World-Wide | 1,438,877 | 24.4 | 13 | 2,353 | 14 | ||
| Europe | 379,402 | 27.8 | 6 | 2,982 | 5 | ||
| Russian Federation | 52,486 | 37% | 17 | 24.5 | 12 | 2,730 | 8 |
| Germany | 50,856 | 62% | 8 | 25.8 | 11 | 2,977 | 6 |
| France | 42,939 | 66% | 5 | 28.6 | 5 | 2,903 | 7 |
| United Kingdom | 37,477 | 60% | 9 | 38.2 | 1 | 3,450 | 2 |
| Italy | 24,225 | 40% | 16 | 18.8 | 19 | 2,027 | 18 |
| Turkey | 23,302 | 32% | 18 | 32.2 | 3 | 3,845 | 1 |
| Spain | 21,612 | 47% | 14 | 27.4 | 7 | 2,401 | 13 |
| Poland | 18,194 | 48% | 13 | 27.4 | 7 | 3,208 | 4 |
| Netherlands | 11,992 | 72% | 1 | 34.3 | 2 | 3,398 | 3 |
| Sweden | 6,231 | 66% | 4 | 25.9 | 10 | 2,697 | 9 |
| Belgium | 6,068 | 55% | 11 | 20.8 | 17 | 2,286 | 15 |
| Switzerland | 4,790 | 63% | 7 | 19 | 18 | 2,027 | 18 |
| Austria | 4,745 | 56% | 10 | 15.1 | 20 | 1,648 | 20 |
| Portugal | 4,286 | 40% | 15 | 21.2 | 16 | 2,186 | 16 |
| Denmark | 3,682 | 66% | 3 | 23.3 | 14 | 2,411 | 12 |
| Finland | 3,387 | 63% | 6 | 26 | 9 | 2,591 | 11 |
| Norway | 3,272 | 67% | 2 | 28.9 | 4 | 2,627 | 10 |
| Ireland | 2,355 | 53% | 12 | 21.3 | 15 | 2,071 | 17 |
There was also a very interesting fact from a media perspective. Although Comscore reckons that the Mail online gets 20m unique visitors in November 2011, the eABC suggest otherwise. It may be down simply to a different interpretation of statistics or a definition of the numbers. The eABC say that the Mail online get 80m unique browsers per month. A huge difference that isn’t easily explained suffice to say that one is measuring unique visitors and the other unique browsers.
Anyway, the Mail online is still the biggest news property on the Net followed by the Guardian. But, the interesting thing is that over 13% of all the visits to the Mail online are preceded by a visit to Facebook (I took care to couch that phrase in the same way that comscore did). Whether it’s the traffic directly from the Mail’s Facebook page (which I doubt as they place stories there sparingly) or, more likely, having Facebook users linking to their pages and thus driving traffic. The Turkish website Milliyet.co..tr was even more reliant on Face book deriving nearly one in five visitors to its site form Facebook.
Love it or Loath it, the online media have to recognise the power of Facebook when it comes to driving traffic to their sites.
| Top 5 Media | Audience | |
| Mail Online | 20,068 | 13.10% |
| Guardian.co.uk | 15,705 | 12.80% |
| Hurriyet.com.tr | 10,429 | 10.00% |
| Bild.de | 9,663 | 14.80% |
| Milliyet.com.tr | 9,628 | 18.90% |
