UK online

The UK has the most active online population in Europe, with the highest average number of daily visitors (21.8m), the highest usage days per month (21 per user), and the highest average time spent per month per user (34.4 hours).¹

4 in 5 Brits now download from the web - while 18 to 34 year olds remain the key downloading demographic (89 per cent), those aged over 55 are catching up with 71 per cent of them downloading from the internet.²

80% of Brits have downloaded music (50%), software updates (46%), photos (26%) and games (26%), with 7% admitting to downloading adult content.

If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it. It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives the blogosphere a bad reputation.
Mena Trott

UK social networking

In 2007 social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace accounted for one in every five Internet page impressions in the UK, and their mass appeal and importance to companies will only increase in 2008.³
127.3m unique visitors used social networks in August – 56% of the European online population.⁴
UK social networking usage proved to be the highest in Europe, with 24.9m unique visitors – 78% of the UK’s web users.⁵

It's always hard to predict what's coming up next. My main guess is that content creators will increasingly start using BitTorrent to distribute their own work directly.
Bram Cohen

UK online: past, present and future

Internet users and penetration in the UK 2005-2011⁶

• 2005: 33.7 million (55.8%)
• 2006: 35.1 million (57.9%)
• 2007: 37.2 million (61.2%)
• 2008: 39.1 million (64.2%)
• 2009: 42.3 million (69.2%)
• 2010: 44.2 million (72.1%)
• 2011: 45.0 million (73.2%)

More than 85% of UK internet users have been online for at least 3 years.⁷

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
Mitch Kapor

Online video in the UK

UK Internet traffic to online video websites increased by 178% between February 2007 and 2008.⁸

The top 25 video websites in the UK accounted for 2.22% of all UK Internet visits in February 2008, equivalent for one in every 45 Internet visits that month.

The internet is the Viagra of big business.
Jack Welch

UK online spend

£30 billion was spent online last year, in the UK the spending per capita was £1,000 and that is expected to rise 30-40% this year. Yet only 12% of total media spend is on the internet. That is well behind the time spent online and so the advertising pound will follow. ⁹

A computer lets you make mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
Mitch Radcliffe

UK online advertising

The UK online advertising industry was valued at over £1, 334 million for the first half of 2007, taking a 14.7% share of the UK advertising industry.¹⁰

The ability to 'listen in' on conversations about you or your competitors may represent one of the best market-research values of the Internet, simply because it's unique to the medium.
Susan Greco

UK Search

Search revenues grew by 44% year-on-year, display by 33% and classifieds by 72%.¹¹
Search accounts for 57.1% of all online advertising; display 21.5% and classifieds 20.8%.¹²
At the end of 2007, social networks accounted for 7.7% of all Internet traffic sent to other websites.¹³

We used to have a lot of questions to which there were no answers. Now, with the computer, there are lots of answers to which we haven’t thought up the questions.
Peter Ustinov

Global internet use

There are currently 1 billion internet users in the world – in a couple of years it will be 40% of the world’s population. 2 billion emails and instant messages are sent each day, 2 million photos are uploaded each day and there are 100 million Yahoo! Groups.¹⁴

The Internet lives where anyone can access it.
Vinton Cerf

¹comScore, June 2007
²Moneysupermarket.com March 2008
³Hitwise/Experian January 2008
⁴comScore, Oct 2007
⁵comScore, Oct 2007
⁶eMarketer, October 2007
⁷BMRB Internet Monitor, August 2007
⁸Hitwise/Experien January 2008
⁹Mark Howe, UK sales director for Google
¹⁰IAB/PwC, April 2007
¹¹IAB/PwC, October 2007
¹²IAB/PwC, October 2007
¹³Hitwise/Experien January 2008
¹⁴Glenn Drury, UK managing director of Yahoo! Europe