Survey tracks home use of Internet

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Portals and search engines, both United States-based and local, feature strongly in the first detailed statistics on New Zealanders' at-home internet surfing habits, released by Nielsen//NetRatings.

Nielsen//NetRatings, a joint venture between television audience researcher ACNielsen and internet measurement software company NetRatings, uses similar techniques to ACNielsen's People Meter television research system to gather data.

In New Zealand, a panel of nearly 3500 randomly selected home internet users have been supplied with software that tracks their every click.

The software monitors each site a panellist visits and the amount of time he or she spends there. It then sends the data for analysis to a server in San Jose, California.

The Asia-Pacific managing director of Nielsen//NetRatings, Brian Milnes, said early results showed that the knowledge that they were being observed had not influenced people's behaviour.

"Adult sites are coming up with the same frequency as other markets. People are obviously feeling comfortable that they can't be recognised."

Nielsen//NetRatings' panellists are collectively visiting about 13,000 sites a month, of which only 1000 are New Zealand-based, a figure that will disappoint many local internet entrepreneurs.

People also seem to spend more time on overseas sites. The average stay on Yahoo, for example, was 57 minutes 44 seconds, compared with 13m 53s for Xtra.

"People are going to Xtra for some very specific local information and then turning to Yahoo for the more general stuff," Mr Milnes said.

But he believed that the longer time spent downloading content from overseas sites might be affecting the figures. Nielsen//NetRatings' panel at present represents only home internet users but an "at-work" panel is now being recruited.

Mr Milnes said the figures showed quite a reasonable balance of surfing throughout the day.

The NetRatings software tracked individuals in households, he said, and so would not correlate with the number of subscribers using an internet provider.

Ihug, for example, counts 65,000 subscribers, yet its site received 77,000 unique visitors.

Commentary

By BRIAN MILNES, managing director, Pacific region, ACNielsen eRatings.com

ACNielsen eRatings.com has released the first set of audience measurement data from its New Zealand Nielsen//NetRatings at-home panel.

The data, covering home Internet activity during March, shows users spent most of their time visiting a combination of local and United States sites.

Coming in first was Microsoft's msn.com with a total of 257,000 visitors for the month.

Xtra, Telecom New Zealand's portal service, was second with 219,000 visitors aged two and above. Xtra and Xtrasite are detailed separately, as visitors can be directed to one or two dedicated servers. These numbers cannot be combined as the majority of visitors between the two domains were almost completely duplicated during the course of the month.

Rounding out the top five most visited domains were US-based yahoo.com and microsoft.com

The New Zealand data correspond with Nielsen//NetRatings panels in Australia, Singapore, Britain and Ireland which show a similar pattern of local and US-based domains occupying the top positions in each country. The panels now have a total of 88,000 individuals under real-time measurement in those countries and in the United States and Japan.

Nielsen//NetRatings data will continue to be reported monthly and provide updated statistics relating to visitor movements on these domains as well as audience growth on other local and international domains.