Women Dominate US Web Activity

  • by July 6, 2000
Data released today by Nielsen//NetRatings shows that the US Internet audience is slightly weighted towards females, who represented 50.8% of the May activity, versus males, who represented 49.2% of the overall audience.

"The demographic split in the Internet audience in the US has evened out over the past 18 months," said Sean Kaldor, VP of E-Commerce at NetRatings. "The female audience in the US is primarily visiting shopping sites, such as jcpenney.com, and spiegel.com, home sites, such as hgtv.com, or general interest sites like oprah.com.”

In general, according to NetRatings, US home users are narrowing their preferred websites while non-US home users remain open to a world of offerings. "Americans visited an average of only 10 sites in the past month," Kaldor said. "By contrast, even though other nations consistently spent less time online, they visited up to twice as many sites. For example, Internet users in the UK went to 16 sites while New Zealanders hit a whopping 19 sites. In countries where dominant market leaders have yet to evolve, consumers still practice window shopping on a much more pervasive basis than in the US."

NetRatings data for Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom shows that the demographic split in overseas surfing remains heavily weighted towards males, creating significant opportunities for marketers targeting females.

NetRatings found that the widest gender split was seen in the UK, where 60.9% of the May audience was male and 39.1% was female, and in Singapore, where 57.6% of the audience was male and 42.4% was female. Males across all markets also spent between two and three hours longer than females surfing in May. Kaldor explained that overseas, the female audience is still primarily visiting portals like ninemsn.com.au in Australia, or msn.com in New Zealand, Ireland and the UK.

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