School Friends' Website Top of Jupiter's Class

The latest website monitoring data from Jupiter MMX1 reveals that friendsreunited.co.uk, the online friend finding service, has now entered the UK's top 20 listings. According to research for October, the site is believed to have attracted over two million unique visitors for the month.

The site allows registrants to sign up to their old schools and colleges and to search for other past classmates who have registered. Almost every school and college in the UK can be found in the register.

Given the wide appeal of the service, the number of visitors to the site has grown rapidly since it first appeared on Jupiter's monthly web research report in June of this year. Back then, the data indicates that it was attracting some 191,000 unique visitors per month. Since then, its incredible growth serves as a clear example of how successful word of mouth recommendations can be for sites. Jupiter's tracking shows that the number of visitors to this site has almost doubled every month till now.

Time spent on the site is also much higher than other sites in Jupiter's research category. When friendsreunited.co.uk first appeared, visitors were spending an average of 19 minutes on it per month. In the subsequent five months, the amount of time spent has increased to a peak of 41 minutes in September. This is almost double the average for other similar sites.

Looked at by visitor gender, friendsreunited.co.uk has more male than female visitors, with 1,156,000 men visiting the site in October 2001. It appeals to all age groups, proving most popular with 25 to 34 year olds. An astonishing quarter of all women in the 25 to 34 age group (27%) who used the Internet from home last month went to the site, and 17.6% of men aged 25 to 34 in the same month.

According to Lucy Green, Jupiter's marketing director, "The simplicity of the idea behind this site, the ease of using it and the benefit of finding long lost school friends has an instant appeal. With no promotional activity, we have seen the site rapidly achieve a ranking amongst the top 20 sites in the UK for at home Internet users. The site has also been successful at attracting every age group, giving it special appeal to advertisers."

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