The NB Report

Net Behaviour is pleased to announce the arrival of The NB Report©. In essense, this report tells us how Irish people use the web.

The NB Report© is carried out by Monitrack Internet Research (MIR), in conjunction with Amárach Consulting. It contains information on over 475 websites used by Irish consumers across all categories; from search engines and blogs to news and media sites, and even on corporate sites within key industry sectors.

The research gathers data on an ongoing basis from over 30 online sampling points and soon it will be imported into the MediaStar software where it will provide a range of coverage and frequency information for Net Behaviour clients.

The document below will give you a flavour of the research concerning the Top 20/30 websites used by Irish people, and more…

The NB Report© will further enhance our digital communications service for NB clients. If you would like to discuss The NB Report© please don't hesitate to contact us.
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The Top 20 Sites

The top categories are, perhaps unsurprisingly, search, airlines, shopping, recruitment, news, chat rooms/messenger, classifieds, and entertainment. Search is used most often and Google is the most popular search engine with a whopping 82% of Irish online users visiting the site every month. Yahoo! comes in second with 51% of online users; Ryanair (47%) and Aer Lingus (47%) come in with third and forth places on our monthly table of top 20 websites and eBay is in fifth position.

An impressive 87% of Irish Google users use the site on a daily basis, compared with 42% of Yahoo! searchers, and 39% of MSN searchers.

Recruitment sites are very popular with Irish people. Most classified Internet sites, such as recruitment sites, are used weekly, or monthly, rather than daily. The most popular recruitment site is Irishjobs.ie, with 35% of Irish people who use the Internet visiting the site in a given month, and 42% of these visiting weekly, it takes position 6 on our top 20 websites. Recruitment sites are well represented accounting for four of the top 20.

Myhome.ie is the most popular property website, with 29% of Ireland’s Internet users going to the site every month; coming in 12th and the only property website to make the NB/ MIR Top 20.

The most popular news source in Ireland is RTE.ie, with 35% of Irish people visiting the site in a month for news, 38% of these daily. In fact, RTE.ie news service comes in at an impressive 9th place on our top 20 Irish Internet uses table. The next most popular news source is BBC.co.uk, with 26% of Irish Internet users per month, and position 15 on our top 20. Skynews.com is in position 17, with 25% visitors per month.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia is very popular indeed with Irish people, 32% using it each month. It comes in at number ten on our top 20. Golden Pages.ie is in 19th position, with 25% visitors.

Three places on our Top 20 are taken up by some of Ireland’s newest Internet uses. MSN Instant Messenger (34% and position 8), YouTube.com (28% and position 13) and iTunes (24% position 20). For those who aren’t familiar with these, Instant Messenger is one-to-one real-time chat software, very popular among younger people, and users of social networks like Bebo.

In fact, Messenger is much more popular than email for this demographic. YouTube.com is the world’s must popular video site, where anyone can upload their own video for all to see, and iTunes.com is owned by Apple, and is Ireland’s most popular space for buying music for MP3 players and iPods.


Household names from 21 to 30

From 21 to 30 we had AIB / 365 Online (24%), Bebo (23%), Daft (22%), Amazon (22%), Argos (22%), Yahoo! Messenger (21%), Ticketmaster (21%), Pigsback (21%), eircom (news) (21%) and finally Tesco (21%). These fall broadly into the categories of banking, shopping, chat and news (eircom).

Internet Categories

MIR treats the Internet as a functional entity exploring website function and use from the users’ perspective, as well as the website address. The total number of people who use a site is easily found even if that site, for example, provides such diverse services as email, news, search, music downloads and radio. However, typically advertising will be placed on a single section of a multifunction site – the business news section, the technology news, or email login and MIR data can provide this basic categorical information, from the users’ perspective.

This approach gives the advantage of providing an accurate estimate, for example, of the total popularity of business news for Irish people on the Internet, whether they visit specific business newspapers online, the business section of a web portal or bulletin boards exploring the demographic breakdown of the audience along the way. Net Behaviour can then target advertising of behalf on clients knowing a lot about the business Internet audience, where they go online and frequency.

We also measure the total popularity of multi-function portals such as RTE.ie or eircom.net regardless of their use (this is not explored in the above table).


Methodology

MIR research is carried out by Monitrack Internet Research in conjunction with Amárach Consulting and is used by Net Behaviour, and Monitrack clients. The NB Report is a cut of this data. The MIR sample is gathered from over 30 websites and search engines visited by Irish people. The sample quoted above is 1,267 and was gathered between January and March 2007. MIR currently contains information on over 475 websites, search engines and web entities used by Irish people. It also explores research and purchase behaviour online, mobile phone usage, blogging, podcasting, bulletin board use and indeed all other Internet uses for Irish people. Sites are explored through a full set of standard demographic information in Media Star and Espri.

‘The Monitrack policy for MIR research is the same as that developed for the JNIR research. The data presented shows people who use the Internet, rather than ‘unique users, ‘impressions’ or ‘hits’, as the research is carried out with questionnaires, rather than with automatic technologies, like tracking software, cookies or server logs. MIR will typically show numbers which are much smaller than other methods but these are counting different things,’ according to Emmet Kelly. ‘Automated research tells a story of activity, rather than people. Researchers, marketers and media buyers need to know about the people who use a product or service online, as much as the activity surrounding that service,’ said Emmet.

In addition to the NB/MIR data, Net Behaviour employs ad-tracking software for ad campaigns, and buys advertising space with existing currencies such as CPM, CPC, CPA and sponsorship. Automated research data such as that provided by ad tracking software is ideal for optimising advertising spend, while MIR tells the story about how the Irish use the web, gives insight, and helps us make predictions.

All MIR research is carried out in-house and the research, and research methods are the property of Monitrack Internet Research

The NB/Monitrack Team

Monitrack is an Internet research specialist, and formerly carried out the JNIR research. The JNIR was originated by Emmet Kelly and Justin Cullen, who subsequently, with Sinéad Morris, also of Monitrack, founded Net Behaviour some 20 months ago. Net Behaviour is an Internet media buying agent for some of Ireland’s largest agencies and has carried out over 300 campaigns since it was founded in late 2005.