Commentary

Tops For Men and Women Mobile and Online

Top 10 Mobile Web Sites

When it comes to the mobile Web, The Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus trope appears to be alive and well. Data released by Nielsen this week showed a sharp contrast between the sites that skew most heavily toward women or men.

Among the 10 sites with the highest proportion of women visitors were social sites like MySpace and Facebook, astrology (Horoscope.com), celebrity news (People.com) and food and lifestyle topics (Kraft Foods). Men were disproportionately drawn to business, tech and sports sites including Gizmodo, NBA.com, BusinessWeek and CBS Sports.

The male-dominated sites also skewed much more heavily toward men than women-leaning sites to women. The audiences of the top 10 guy-leaning sites were 86% to 95% men, while those of sites favored mostly by women were only 55% to 68% composed of women.

Neither of the Web's two biggest players -- Google and Yahoo -- made either top 10 list for men or women. That's because the sites were ranked by audience composition rather than monthly unique visitors --the usual metric for gauging audience size.

"Therefore, sites like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Google Search, The Weather Channel, and MSN Hotmail, are among the top mobile Web sites 10 most visited by both men and women," explained Chris Quick, client services manager for mobile media at Nielsen. He added that social sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter in particular have accelerated the mobile Web's growth in the last year.

Overall, mobile Web use increased 34% to 57 million in the last year ending July. While men still make up a larger portion of the mobile audience than women (53% to 47%), the number of female visitors year-over-year grew faster-43% to 26% for men.

One other interesting finding was that AT&T Search, T-Mobile and Sprint News all figured in the top 10 women-skewing sites. This suggests that women are still relying more heavily than men on the carrier decks for news and information. It could also reflect the higher percentage of men using smartphones, and skipping carrier portals to go right to the same sites they flock to on the wired Web.

 Top 10 Web Sites-Women

 Top 10 Web Sites- Men

1 comment about "Tops For Men and Women Mobile and Online".
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  1. Kim Dushinski from Mobile Marketing Profits, October 7, 2009 at 3:11 p.m.

    At first glance it seems that this is a list of the top 10 sites that men visit and the top 10 sites that women visit, but it isn't that at all.

    It is the sites that happen to have the highest percentage of women visitors and those that have the highest percentage of men who visit.

    These are very different and marketers reading this should be careful not to read this as women spend the majority of their time on the mobile web at celebrity, horoscope and on deck portals.

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