New Internet home audience figures from Nielsen/ NetRatings show that Internet service providers (ISPs) are attracting Irish visitors to their websites for the longest periods. Eircom.net and Iol.ie took the top two positions for numbers of Irish visitors in April, while Oceanfree.net and Eircom.net topped the list for keeping surfers longest on their sites.
However, the report does not indicate that visitors to these sites are primarily subscribers to their Internet access service. When home users log on to the Internet, the ISPs' home pages are the default access point to the Internet, unless users point their home pages to other websites.
The Nielsen/NetRatings survey found that Internet surfers spent an average of 24 minutes at Oceanfree.net, while the average session on Eircom.net was 18 minutes. Next in line was Ebid.ie, the Internet auction site with 17 minutes.
Ireland.com came in as the most visited site after the five biggest ISPs, with a unique audience of Irish visitors for the month of April of 31,545, followed by Rte.ie with 27,183.
At the launch of the survey this week, questions were raised as to its validity as an accurate indicator of Irish Internet behaviour. Because the survey is based solely on people accessing the Internet from home, it excludes the business user, currently the single biggest user of electronic data.
This also explains the large bias towards local Internet service providers as most of the representative sample must go through these ISPs to gain dial-up access to the Internet.
The figures are also solely based on Irish-based Internet users visiting Irish websites. It does not take into account the amount of non-Irish traffic being generated to individual sites.
The survey found that banking and flight booking sites were attracting Irish users for the longest periods to their sites after the main ISPs. These were followed closely by news and content-rich sites, including Ireland.com, Rte.ie and Buyandsell.net.
The Nielsen/Netratings survey of Irish Internet usage for April found the top five sites in Ireland by domain name to be: Msn.com, Yahoo.com, Eircom.net, Iol.ie and Microsoft.com.
The survey concluded that the figures showed Irish Internet users spent an average of just over 4.5 hours per month surfing the Internet and views more than 350 Web pages, representing a slight increase on March figures. By comparison, the US home user spends almost twice this time surfing, while British users surf more than five hours per month.
The survey also concluded the gender gap was narrowing with female users increasing from 42 per cent in March to 44 per cent in April. However, men still spend more time online, at around 5.5 hours per month, where women spend just three hours and 20 minutes.
Nielsen/Netratings recruited more than 3,100 individuals for the survey panel, and then selected 2,564 eligible panelists it deemed representative of Irish Internet users aged two or over with Internet access from home.
