WORLD
Germany, Russia have the largest internet audiences in Europe
Baku, May 10 (AZERTAC). In March 2011, 363.7 million people went online in Europe, averaging around 26 hours of internet use per visitor. Germany led the field with 49.7 million unique visitors, but the level of engagement was slightly lower than the European mean. German internet users spent an average of 23.4 hours online during the month.
Russia, France and the UK followed behind Germany with 47.4 million, 42.3 million, and 36.2 million visitors respectively.
The Netherlands ranked ninth in terms of visitors but had the highest levels of engagement.
Internet users from the Netherlands spent an average of 34.4 hours online in March - 33 percent longer than Europe as a whole, commented market analyst firm comScore in a report released May 4.
“Visitors in the Netherlands also viewed 3,515 pages each on average, 31 percent greater than the European average,” said comScore.
In a separate study released in April, comScore found that the Netherlands ranked number one worldwide for Twitter and LinkedIn penetration.
In March 90.8 percent of the total European internet audience visited Google Sites, the top internet property for the region with 330.3 million visitors.
Microsoft Sites ranked second with 272.8 million visitors and a reach of 75 percent. Social network Facebook was third with 234.6 million visitors and 64.5 percent reach.
Peer-to-peer file sharing site the BitTorrent Network was surprisingly high on the list of top properties, beating companies like AOL, Apple and video sharing site Dailymotion in terms of visitors.
While there were more than 72.2 million visitors to the BitTorrent Network, they only spent an average of 0.1 minute on the site over the course of the month.
Top 10 web properties in Europe by total unique visitors appears as follows: 1. Google Sites 330,328,000 visitors; 2. Microsoft Sites 272,840,000; 3. Facebook.com 234,635,000; 4. Wikimedia Foundation Sites 156,913,000; 5. Yahoo! Sites 144,220,000; 6. eBay 107,065,000; 7. Amazon Sites 88,685,000; 8. Mail.ru Group 72,213,000; 9. BitTorrent Network 72,191,000; 10. The Mozilla Organization 70,906,000.