• by Masha Geller , July 27, 2001

According to the latest report from Nielsen//NetRatings, more than one million surfers flooded IRS.gov from their office computers during the week ending July 22 for the latest information on recent tax relief legislation. IRS.gov took the top ranking as the fastest growing domain for the week.

T.S. Kelly, director and principal analyst at NetRatings, said that a recent mass mailing alerted most Americans to the timing and amount of their refund, and many of those individuals then "flocked online to IRS.gov for further details. The latest increase in traffic to the government site is yet another indication that Americans are using the Web as a day-to-day information tool."

Traffic to IRS.gov skyrocketed 188% to more than one million unique visitors, as compared to 366,000 the previous week. According to NetRatings, 58% of the site's audience visited the page featuring information on tax rebates and advance tax credit payments. Surfers spent nearly eight minutes on the site, visiting pages with information on when tax credit payments will be issued and how payments are calculated.

Elsewhere on the web, NetRatings shows that the most visited sites for the week were AOL Time Warner, Yahoo!, MSN, Microsoft and Lycos both at home and at work. Top advertisers, ranked by banner impressions, were MSN, Microsoft, TRUSTe, Yahoo! and eBay.

NetRatings calculated that the average click rate for top banners went up 4% at home and 9.1% at work, with .26 and .12 respectively.

The time people spent online last week is almost equal to the week before. The active online universe (people that actually surfed last week) is holding almost constant at 74 million at home and 34 million at work. People went online an average of 6 times from home and 12 times from work last week, spending an average of 30 minutes online each time, viewing about 36 pages for less than a minute each.