Most marketers know that December is normally an unpredictable period as the year winds down, and the festive holiday season puts the consumers in a another mind space. This causes consumers to use the internet differently. But how different?
Looking at December’s Netratings data, you will notice the decrease in the amount of users on the OPA registered sites during the holiday season, with overall unique users’ percentage decrease of 16% compared to the previous month. In December, the amount of unique users online was 4,663,783 with 231,827,427 page impressions. This is a decrease of about 888,400 unique visitors. On the top 20 domestic usage sites, the only website not experiencing a decrease in unique users during the silly season is the number one visited SA site – news24.com with 1,126,834 unique users and over 22 million page impressions.
However, no result should be viewed in isolation. At closer inspection, you would be able to see what consumers were doing online during this period. As the year comes to an end, users’ headspace revolved around gifts and traveling (% growth in websites such as Exclusive Books and GoTravel24), online social media (% growth in websites such as Thunda.com and Speakerbox), and sport (% growth in websites such as Nedbank Golf Challenge and other sporting websites).
| Rank | Website | Unique Browsers | Page Impressions |
| - | Market Aggregate | 4,663,783 | 231,827,427 |
| 1 | news24.com | 1,126,834 | 22,359,029 |
| 2 | MSN | 657,992 | 9,022,311 |
| 3 | Hotmail | 551,846 | 28,930,805 |
| 4 | www.mweb.co.za | 537,843 | 17,778,349 |
| 5 | IOL News | 503,482 | 7,281,883 |
| 6 | Webmail | 455,933 | 22,470,767 |
| 7 | Vodacom4Me | 401,572 | 11,664,271 |
| 8 | yellowpages.co.za | 348,102 | 3,062,718 |
| 9 | fin24.co.za | 310,663 | 2,112,027 |
| 10 | supersport.co.za | 226,595 | 4,069,169 |
Source: OPA, Nielsens/Netratings
Traffic Rankings Statistics for South Africa, supplied by Alexa, indicates that the most visited national and international sites the past 3 months are sites such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, YouTube and Wikipedia, which actually comes at no surprise. But the stats also show a presence of blogging portals (such as blogger.com and wordpress.com) which reflects the increased interest in blogging in South Africa.
South African Traffic Rankings from Alexa:
1. google.co.za
2. facebook.com
3. google.com
4. Yahoo!
5. YouTube
6. Wikipedia
7. Windows Live
8. Microsoft Network (MSN)
9. Blogger.com
10. News24
11. Gumtree.co.za
12. The Standard Bank of South Africa
13. ABSA Group Banks
14. Microsoft Corporation
15. M-Web
16. Independent Online (IOL)
17. Flickr
18. WordPress.com
19. BBC Newsline Ticker
20. Bid Or Buy
On the other side of the spectrum, mobile usage stats reflect quite the opposite. Vodafone Live’s unique visits, for instance, had a significant increase during this period. The usage rates across December spikes on Christmas day, as many consumers received Mobile Phones as gifts.
Online reflects a consumer’s frame of mind as you can normally see trends of how people move across sites depending on the time of year. Although this analysis looks at percentage change on the stats, the bottom line is that people are still online and this trend is growing everyday.
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