New Net Data for South Africa

Nielsen//NetRatings has released the first set of data on the at-home surfing behaviour of Internet users in South Africa. This service represents the company's first attempt at tracking within Africa. The research covers the range of Internet user behaviour from data collected from randomly selected home consumer panels.

According to Richard Basil-Jones, managing director of Middle East & Africa for ACNielsen eRatings.com, "By providing Internet audience measurement for the important South African market, we are pleased to extend our industry-leading coverage to 27 countries around the world. As a global service with true consistency of information, Nielsen//NetRatings will enable easy comparison of data for South Africa with data from other countries."

Headline findings from the first results show that, in terms of average usage for the month of June, some 1,499,000 South Africans had access to the Internet from their household PC. The average connection time was four hours and 32 minutes. In this sense, monthly Internet usage in South Africa is similar to the global average. This is with the exception of the fairly short amount of time spent online over the month. On average, users connected 10 times per month in sessions lasting more than 26 minutes. The results also show a distinct male bias in South Africa's Internet audience (60% male and 40% female in June), a feature indicative of an Internet market in the early stages of development.

For the month of June the most popular web properties for home users across South Africa was split between global web brands and local financial services, portals, search engines and community sites, with MSN emerging on top with 323,569 unique page visits for the month, the M-Web Portal ranking second with 250,31, Yahoo! third with 245,414, and Absa Bank emerging fourth with 215,366. Other popular destinations were (in order) Microsoft, Johnnic e-Ventures, AOL Time Warner, Lycos Network, Tiscali and Africa.com.

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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