hitwise - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Visits to the BBC's iPlayer have increased 15-fold over the past month, thanks mainly to a major advertising campaign for the catch-up TV service.

The figures from Hitwise's Robin Goad show that the iPlayer, having launched a streaming version of the service and opened up to the public, has begun to take off.

Social networks received more UK traffic than webmail services for the first time last month, according to Hitwise.

In October, the top 25 social network sites received 5.17% of all UK internet visits, compared to 4.98% for email services like Hotmail, Gmail and others.

Smaller online retailers in the US are far more reliant on search engines to drive their traffic, according to a new study from Hitwise.

The research group looked into the search traffic of companies in Internet Retailer's top 500 list over the past two years, and found that half of merchants ranked 400-500 in the list received more than half of their visitors via Google, Yahoo! et al.

Hitwise UK has some interesting figures showing how effective widgets can be in driving traffic to websites from social networks.

Slide.com and RockYou, two providers of photo-sharing widgets, have moved rapidly up the rankings in the photography websites category, according to Heather Hopkins.

New stats from Hitwise show that over 55s, or ‘silver surfers’, are close to becoming the largest demographic age group online.

The largest is currently the 35-44 age group, which accounted for 23.5% of internet visits in the four weeks up to 12th May. Silver surfers had 22% of visits.

The audience for online newspaper sites in the US is growing at twice the rate of the overall web audience, according to new figures.

The Nielson//NetRatings report, released by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), also suggests that visitors to these sites have higher incomes, as well as being more inclined to shop online.

While people queued for up to eight hours outside Topshop's Oxford Street store to be the first to get hold of the new clothing range designed by Kate Moss, Topshop's website experienced similar demand.

The Topshop site, which starting selling the Kate Moss collection online from 4am yesterday, reportedly sold out of the range within 12 hours, and UK visits to the Topshop website have doubled over the last two days.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo industry conference in San Francisco this week, Bill Tancer of Hitwise revealed that Web 2.0 sites have lower levels of audience participation than is commonly assumed.

For instance, a mere 0.16% of visits to YouTube are by users who are actually uploading material, with the vast majority being visits by 'lurkers' - people who do not contribute to the site.

Online research group Hitwise has been bought by Experian in a $240m (£120m) deal.

The credit information provider says it will use the acquisition to extend the range of online and offline marketing services it can offer its clients.

Hitwise has published a list of the most popular UK websites in more than 50 categories last year, based on each site's market share of user visits.

It also lists the brands which were most searched for in 2006, with eBay unsurprisingly placing first and social networking site Bebo coming in second.