How we surf in NZ: Time online

There are lots of ways of measuring how popular a website is. The industry started with ‘hits’, before realising that a page could generate countless hits. The local industry moved to ‘Unique Visitors’ and, once the number of Unique Visitors exceeded the population of New Zealand, to ‘Unique Browsers’. Many sites and advertisers like using ‘Page Impressions’, as it shows, in theory, how many times those advertisements have been seen.

My favorite right now is ‘Viewing Time’.

‘Viewing Time’ is the amount of time a person spends in front of a particular website during a period.

Let’s look at some numbers. In February 2007 there were 5.8m domestic unique browsers looking at the 314 major NZ websites covered by Nielsen NetRatings. Notable exclusions are Google, Yahoo and Bebo – and all other international websites.

With 4.1m New Zealanders clearly there is more than one browser per person – so let’s say there are 2.5 browsers per person. (I completely made that up). That would mean there were 2.3m people in NZ that used the internet in February, and they used it for an average of 8 hours (excluding the foreign sites) in the month, or 2 hours per week. Big numbers.

Now let’s see where peoople spent their time. .

That’s right – almost 60% of the time spent on local sites by Kiwi’s is spent on Trade Me.

Second placed XtraMSN just blew up their site, so their numbers will divide between the new msn.co.nz and Yahoo!xtra. NZCity performs well, as do NZHerald and Stuff, while AirNZ manages to be NZ’s biggest ecommerce site with just 1.4% of the viewing time – efficient and effective.

The tail is very long – 20th place National Bank has just 0.3% of the traffic, while 53rd placed NZGirl has just 0.08% – I guess all their members are on Bebo.

Let’s look at the absolute numbers. The amount of time people spent looking at tracked websites rose by 29% from last Feb to this Feb (some additional sites were tracked, more people use the internet and average time per person went up). I converted the browsing time (which equals Unique Browsers x Frequency x Average Session Duration) into Years, just to make the numbers easier to imagine.

So 513 years worth of browsing time were spent on Trade Me in February 2007, up from 380 years in February 2006. That is 35% year on year growth. Also showing strong growth were APN with 27%, Fairfax (41%), Seek (51%) and realestate.co.nz (a staggering 297% – they had a big relaunch).

Trade Me was responsible for two thirds of the market’s y/y growth in the total viewing time.

XtraMSN grew at 8%, much less than the average growth rate, and NZCity’s properties actually lost viewership, dropping time on site by 5%.

In theory the relative amount of money received from display advertising by each site should approximately follow the charts. Some theory…

Scoopit!