Unique visitors to newspaper properties in Europe up 11% year-over-year in June to 167.2 million, spending average of 40.5 minutes/month, says report; British Daily Mail most visited, followed by The Guardian, Germany's Bild

Lorena Madrigal

LONDON , August 18, 2011 (press release) – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released an overview of Internet usage in Europe, showing 368.6 million unique visitors went online in June 2011 for an average of 26.1 hours per person. This release highlights Internet usage in 49 European markets aggregated under the European region and provides individual reporting on 18 markets. Among the reportable markets, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Turkey continued to show the highest average engagement, with users from these markets spending an average of more than 31 hours online in the past month.

European Travel Sites Show Biggest Gains Since May 2011
Google Sites ranked as the top European web property in June with 335.4 million unique visitors (up 6 percent from a year ago), reaching 91.0 percent of the total European Internet audience. Microsoft Sites continued to rank second with 259.8 million visitors (70.5 percent reach), followed by Facebook.com in third place with 246.4 million visitors (66.8 percent reach). Among the top 50 properties for June, the biggest gains versus May came from Priceline.com Inc., which includes other travel sites Agoda and Booking.com, showing an overall 15 percent increase. Expedia Inc. also showed a 7-percent increase in visitors compared to May 2011, largely driven by an increase in traffic to TripAdvisor Sites.

Europeans continued to spend most of their time on average on social networking sites. Although European engagement with Russian social network VKontakte declined by 6 percent from the previous month, the property continued to display the highest average engagement among the top 30 properties, with Europeans spending 465.4 minutes (7.8 hours) on the site. Facebook.com maintained its lead over Russian web property Mail.ru in June with an average of 328.8 minutes (5.5 hours) spent by visitors on the property. Facebook.com also continued to account for the highest number of page views at 151.5 billion in June (up 8 percent), representing 15.3 percent of all pages viewed in Europe during the month.

Spotlight: Newspaper Site Audience Increases 11 Percent in the Past Year
In June 2011, a total of 167.2 million unique visitors went to Newspaper properties in Europe (up 11 percent from a year ago), spending 40.5 minutes on average during the month. The most visited Newspaper property in Europe was the British Daily Mail, drawing 17.2 million unique visitors who each spent an average of 25.9 minutes on the site. The Daily Mail also currently ranks as the second most popular Newspaper site worldwide.

The Guardian ranked second in Europe with 13.5 million unique visitors, followed by the German newspaper Bild with 9.9 million unique visitors. Turkish newspapers Hürriyet and Milliyet also ranked among the top five Newspaper properties, drawing 9.5 million unique visitors and 8.8 million unique visitors, respectively. Also among the top sites for June 2011 were French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro and Komsomolskaya Pravda and RIA Novosti from Russia. The New York Times property, the only non-European site in the list of top Newspaper entities, attracted nearly 5.7 million online readers from Europe.

About comScore
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