Vital stats social networks overtake webmail

Robin Goad, Media Week, 13 November 2007, 12:00AM

UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based e-mail services for the first time in October.

Combined visits to the top 25 social networks, including Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK internet visits, compared to 4.98% for the Hitwise e-mail services category, which includes Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail.

This confirms what many industry commentators have suspected: social networks are eating into the web-based e-mail 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 e-mail. One-thirteenth of all UK web traffic now comes from a social network, slightly more than comes from webmail.

The amount of UK internet traffic online retailers receive from social networks increased by 153% between December 2006 and September 2007, with 3.1% of visits to Hitwise's Shopping and Classifieds category coming from a social network. And it's not just retailers that are benefiting. After Google UK, the second-largest referrer of traffic to charity donation site JustGiving is Facebook, which accounts for one in every 10 visits.

Despite this, social networks haven't overtaken e-mail services across the board. Age plays a very significant role, with younger internet users preferring social networks, while older surfers are sticking with e-mail. For example, 62% of Facebook users are aged between 18 and 34, while 55% of Hotmail users are aged 35 and above.

Social networking may no longer be "just for the kids", but it seems that older internet users still have a way to go before they embrace it with quite the same passion as their children and grandchildren.

Robin Goad, director of research, Hitwise UK.

This article was first published on Media Week