Porn surfing soars, but portals dominate

More UK internet users are visiting adult websites than those featuring news, sport, job listings and online auctions, research has shown.

The revealing findings from internet research firm Net Value's ongoing study of UK surfing habits, show that among home surfers, X-rated sites lag only behind those devoted to ISPs, music and books, with adult site visitors viewing more pages per visit.

Net Value is tracking 1600 UK households using software installed on each participant's computer. The survey last week revealed that during May over a third of UK surfers had visited an adult site, and that 40 per cent of the top 5769 websites visited were X-rated.

But new statistics revealed to vnunet.com this week show that portals and ISP sites still attract the most visitors. Music and book retail sites combined also attract more visitors than adult sites. However, communication, TV, education, financial services, games, travel and tourism, general entertainment, gambling, auctions, sports, news, movies and job finding sites all attract less.

Crucially, from an advertising point of view, although those visiting adult sites are not necessarily staying longer, they are looking at more pages. The web industry calls this stickiness - a term used to describe how many pages a visitor clicks on at a website before moving on to another site.

Some 60 per cent of this adult-related traffic is by so-called heavy internet users - those who log on 16 days a month.

Just over a fifth of this type of traffic is generated by students. Worryingly, 3.6 per cent of it is generated by under 15s, which works out at around 120,000 unique visits.

The 3.6 million surfers visiting adult sites viewed an average of 53.48 unique page impressions each during May, amounting to 192.6 million in total. In comparison, the 4.3 million surfers visiting music and book sites clicked on an average of only 16.68 pages per month, 71.1 million in total.

The UK's favourite adult website for men attracted an estimated 392,000 unique male visits in May, some 6.4 per cent of all male users. The most popular adult site among women attracted an estimated 68,000 unique female visits, or 1.8 per cent of all women surfers.

However, compared with mainstream sites where brands are better known, adult traffic looks relatively small. For example, the UK's most popular site last month according to Net Value was MSN, which had an estimated 5.7 million unique visitors, some 57.2 per cent of all UK surfers. Streetsonline, the UK's most popular shopping website, was visited by one in six UK surfers.

Source: Net Value May 2000

Meanwhile, Net Value and fellow research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres Group (TNS) are developing an efficiency measurement product for advertisement spending on the internet.

It will integrate Net Value's audience data into TNS' AdNetTrack service to value the campaigns in terms of GRP (an index of advertisement pressure) and to characterise them by target groups. It is billed as allowing advertising agencies and business to create, react to and evaluate the efficiency of their marketing campaigns on the internet.