Thanks to a year on year visitor increase of 185%, Facebook has overtaken Google.com as the most visited website in the US.
According to the latest Hitwise statistics, Google has been knocked off the top spot by Facebook; making the social media giant the most visited site in America. Whilst the difference between the two may be negligible (Google commands 7.03% of the total visitor share, Facebook 7.07%), the significance of this shift in power could be far reaching.
But before we get too carried away, there are a number of factors that can’t be ignored.
Firstly, these statistics are just from the US market. They don’t take into account any other Internet users, so aren’t representative of the wider world.
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Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first registration of a .com domain. But the Internet has come a long way since Symbolics.com was registered on March 15th 1985 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A mere 25 years ago, the fledgling Internet registered its first .com domain. At the time it would have been impossible to predict just how momentous this small action would be and what it would lead to. Whilst the initial uptake was slow, taking almost two years to gather 10 registrations, the .com suffix was to become an industry standard.
Since these early days, growth has snowballed. By the end of the millennium 21 million .com domain names had been secured. Today, that number is estimated to be nearer 80 million. .com has become default address for the 1.7 billion Internet users today. Whilst it has generally become a more US orientated domain, the .com still has a universality like no other suffix, despite the array of competitors.
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The abandonment of traditional media in favour of the Internet has continued to gather momentum with the revelation that online is now the third highest news source in America, knocking newspapers down to fourth.
The latest industry figures show that 61 per cent of Americans now rely on the Internet as a primary source of their daily news fix. This places it third in the US market, behind local news television stations (78%) and national TV outlets (71%). This reflects the growing worldwide trend for having news on demand, in near real-time and completely free.
The Internet has become a major new battleground for many industries – new and old. News being one of the most significant of these. As access has widened, speeds have improved and costs have (proportionally) lowered, traditional offline businesses have struggled to cope with the shifting demands and monetising opportunities online. Within the media, this has led to a significant lowering in the consumption of printed content.
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With the UK officially out of recession, online retailers will be hoping for a bumper sales year. But what are the online shopping trends likely to be for the year ahead and what can the past teach us about what to expect?
The dark clouds of the credit crunch seem to have passed (or at the very least, parted), so with consumers having more money and better access to the Internet, 2010 promises to be yet another good year for etailers.
Last year alone, the online retail industry grew by 14%. So despite the apparent gloom of recession, the online market has continued to thrive. But whilst all arrows are currently pointing upwards, there are some notes of caution to temper any buoyant optimism, the most obvious of which is the VAT rise.
To help you to optimise sales and capitalise in a bullish market, we’ve put together a quick guide to the trends to look out for this year.
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10 years on from the cataclysmic collapse of the dotcom boom, we look at what it takes to make an online business successful today.
A mere decade ago the Internet was in tatters, with start-ups everywhere imploding due to the sudden crash of stock value and a sudden realisation of the worthlessness of online property. In the heady days of teenage millionaires and geeks galore owning thousands of stocks in a multitude of websites they’d had a hand in, the Internet was a very different beast. Opportunity was abound and investors were clamouring for the opportunity to throw their money at something, today things have moved on.
In the year 2000, almost every idea was a new one. People were still only just coming around to the idea of using the Internet as a marketing platform and as such getting a foothold was relatively easy. The trouble was that not every idea was a good one, but they still continued to invest right up until the moment the administrators knocked down the front door and stripped their assets. Now there is competition, and plenty of it too, so you have to be clever as a fledgling business with how you market yourself.
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After the financial doom and gloom that has shrouded the nation for the past year or so, this morning’s announcement that we are out of recession will come as a welcome respite. However, for online retailers 2009 has been a bumper year, with a 14% year on year increase.
We may now be able to consign phrases like credit crunch to the jargon bin, but it appears that while the nation’s wealth has only been increased by 0.1%, online retailers have been experiencing bumper profits. £5.46 billion was spent online in December alone, which represents a 17% increase on the same period last year.
According to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, consumers have purchased 14% more online in 2009 than they did the year before. Positive movements have been seen in almost every sector, which goes someway to show just how dependent we are on the Internet and how keen we are to take advantage of its convenience.
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The Internet has freed up the way in which we communicate. Companies can engage with their customers without the usual boundaries (although many still fail), consumers can find what they need in minutes without leaving their home or office and information can be shared globally in real-time.
But the many benefits of the Internet are often overshadowed by an equally prevalent dark underbelly of crime and social apprehension. The freedom with which we are able to provide details and thoughts, has spread fear, mistrust and abuses right throughout the world.
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The impending postal strikes, which are due to take place across the UK on Thursday and Friday, have forced many major companies to seek alternative delivery methods. However, without the budget to cover the additional cost of using a specialist courier service, or the product quantities to justify such a move, many online businesses may be set to suffer more than most.
After years of massive gains for the online ecommerce industry, these postal strikes have offered something of a wakeup call to businesses of all sizes. With Christmas rapidly approaching, consumers are looking to secure the last of the bargains and get their shopping done for the festive season nice and early. This makes the current strike plans all the more galling for Internet-based companies.
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If further proof were needed that we are moving towards a media centralised on the Internet, today’s announcement that England’s World Cup qualifier football match with Ukraine will be televised exclusively online should certainly help.
For around £5, a million England supporters – numbers are limited so as not to overload the system – can enjoy the now inconsequential game on their PC (or Mac). Whilst this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, it is the first time that an Internet company has been granted exclusive rights to host a live England match; quite a milestone.
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It’s official, online advertising has overtaken television in terms of financial investment. It has been announced that Internet ads now account for 23.5% of the UK’s entire advertising spend, leapfrogging TV which slips to 21.9%.
Whilst advertising revenue in general has seen a marked drop in the past year or so, up to 16.6% it has been suggested, the Internet has remained steadfast, even making small gains. This year in fact online advertising spend has grown to £1.75bn, which represents a 4.6% upward shift in the first six months. So what does this all mean? Is the Internet now the best place to advertise?
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The Internet could soon be a safer place thanks to an American team of technologists. The idea is simple enough; provide areas of the web with immunity. Understanding the viral nature of worms, the team, headed by Scott Coull and Boleslaw Szymanski, want to strengthen defences of a core group of computers.
With recent Twitter Denial of Service attacks (although not immediately related) and other major online viruses, online security has rarely been out of the headlines. Locally of course, we can all set up firewalls and anti-virus systems, both at home and in the office. But with a wider protective shield covering the Internet, working online could become significantly safer.
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Over the past couple of years, the media buzzword has been ‘credit crunch’. We’ve been inundated with doom and gloom stories of struggling retailers, repossessed homes and banks collapsing. But as with all downturns, there are some businesses that buck the trend.
Whilst back in the 1920’s it was mostly bootleggers, today there is an altogether different trend. Although, that said, many might argue that today’s bootleggers have moved from ‘hooch’ to music and video, just look at Pirate Bay, but that’s a different story altogether.
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The Express have unveiled their new website makeover and whilst it certainly represents a giant stride, it’s a little hard to tell whether it’s forward or back.
Teething problems are to be expected whenever you release a completely new concept, but the new site appears to miss the mark on a number of levels. Whilst some errors are forgivable others are a little more baffling and even laughable.
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The movement towards paying for your online news appears to be gathering pace. Rupert Murdoch appears to have completely ignored how content online is distributed and decided that it’s time for his News Corporation sites to start charging.
The assertion that quality, unique content is something worth paying for is not wholly incorrect. If reporters have spent a good deal of time and resources unearthing a news story that nobody else is covering, then there will be demand and you should expect to pay a fee. However, these cases are rare.
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As reported yesterday – Twitter Has Denial of Service Attack – the micro-blogging site was taken down yesterday along with Facebook and LiveJournal.
The conspiracy theories have started and Mashable have just posed the question about whether this DoS was targeting one man, a blogger in Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu.
All very interesting and, of course, we’ll probably never really know the truth of what’s happened here. Twitter, though, have certainly suffered and will no doubt be undertaking a serious review of their security.
Let us know what you think. Was Twitter targeted as part of cyber-terrorism?
