• by July 2, 2001

The first weekly set of Internet statistics for Western Europe compiled by Jupiter Media Metrix Inc. show site accesses in France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. continue to grow.

Germany is now the Internet hotspot, with just over 10 million weekly unique visitors to the surveyed Web sites, and 142.7 average page views per week by Net users in the country, the report said.

The U.K. is tracking Germany in second position, with 9.93 million unique visitors for the week ending June 17, although the U.K. trails France, Germany and Italy in terms of the average weekly page views.

Delving into the figures reveals that Microsoft and Yahoo are in the top five Web sites in the four countries surveyed.

Jupiter Media Metrix spokesperson Andreas Gutjahr told Newsbytes that the weekly European Internet figures have been produced in response to demand from the research firm's clients.

"The monthly figures are still available, but are used mainly for longer term planning by customers. The weekly figures, which are the first of their type, allow customers to measure responses to advertising and marketing campaigns," he said.

Figures for U.K. Internet domains in the week ending June 10 show that MSN.com had a 35% reach, followed by Passport.com with 24% and Yahoo.com at 21%.

Freeserve and AOL in the fourth and fifth positions recorded 20% and 19% Internet reaches, respectively.

The story for the U.K. market for global domains is slightly different, although MSN.com had an even greater reach with 42.8%, well ahead of second-place Yahoo.com's 28.9%.

Passport and AOL brought up third and fourth positions, respectively, with 28.9 and 24.2%, followed by Freeserve at 20.9%.

Jupiter says that reach differs from market share as it measures the percentage of Internet users viewing a given portal or site. Since single users can access multiple sites, reach percentages add up to more than 100%.

- Newsbytes.com