US sites dominate UK web viewing figures

NEWS Of the 8,500 active home internet users surveyed in the UK, 33 per cent visited MSN.com in December and 25.5 per cent visited Yahoo.com. MSN's figures are doubtlessly helped by the fact that many PCs ship MSN as the default homepage and default search engine for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Nielsen/NetRatings is currently studying how many consumers retain the default homepage, to calculate the effectiveness of such a ploy. However, Microsoft's other sites also scored highly on filling the rest of the top five. The corporate site Microsoft.com, the internet wallet Passport.com and branded UK site MSN.co.uk, had been visited by 22.9 per cent, 21.4 per cent and 18.9 per cent of surveyed users, respectively. The highest-ranking UK sites both in terms of active reach and pages viewed were BBC.co.uk and Freeserve.co.uk. Among the sites that saw the greatest decline were Altavista.com, Excite.co.uk and Netscape.com.