"Many government websites are failing to attract readers despite extensive spending, new figures have revealed. Information published today by Technology Guardian shows that many of the government's Internet operations are underperforming, despite vast funding and investment. One website, UK World Heritage Sites (www.ukworldheritage.org.uk) managed only 77 visitors last year." [My italics]
This may sound like an unlikely horror story for our shores, until you take a closer look at some statistics.
United States Governmental Traffic
According to Hitswise, the federal, state, and local governmental share of Internet visits for the month of July 2005 was alarmingly small at a combined total of a whopping 1.17%, distributed as follows:
Date Federal State City, County
July 2005 0.59% 0.51% 0.07%
While this may be a far cry from 77 visits in a year to any one particular site, this clearly shows that the average U.S. Internet visitor -- say 98.83% of them -- is going elsewhere.
July 2007
While the overall traffic to our sites may well have increased by July 2007, our share of this traffic actually decreased to a rather dismal combined total of 1.00%, as follows:
Date Federal State City, County
July 2007 0.43% 0.50% 0.07%
Elsewhere, indeed.
July 2008
Fast-forward another 12 months: For July 2008, we finally see an improvement in our share of visitors, which rose 24% for a combined total of 1.24%:
Date Federal State City, County
July 2008 0.52% 0.65% 0.07%
Nevertheless, at these levels -- where barely one visit in a hundred is headed for any of literally thousands of federal, state, and local government sites -- the question does go begging: Where do Internet visitors actually go?
Tracking Usage
Prior to June of 2000, no one was exactly sure, for it was only around this time that we began to see our first comprehensive Internet usage analyses. This, for one, was the year when Nielsen Media Research launched Nielsen//Netratings, and in its August 1 press release included a snapshot of where visitors were heading on the now much talked about World Wide Web during the month of June, 2000.
Category Visits Percentage
Search Engines/Portals 102,201,480 14.48%
E-mail 74,311,191 10.53%
Entertainment 59,839,149 8.48%
Personal/Business S/W 53,893,623 7.64%
News & Information 52,968,762 7.51%
Shopping 48,838,764 6.92%
Online Communities 48,740,761 6.91%
Directories/Classifieds 36,310,645 5.15%
Finance/Insurance/Invest. 30,469,864 4.32%
Family & Lifestyles 28,872,064 4.09%
Corporate Information 26,767,290 3.79%
Adult 25,086,742 3.55%
Travel 24,396,077 3.46%
Sweepstakes/Coupons 24,282,687 3.44%
Education 22,038,889 3.12%
Government/Non-Profit 20,268,333 2.87%
Sports 14,895,254 2.11%
Automotive 11,319,074 1.60%
Health & Fitness 211,092 0.03%
Clearly, search engines and portals like Yahoo!, AOL and Lycos, ruled the roost, with e-mail application a distant second.
The same press release also reported on the sites visited for the month of June 2000:
Rank Property Visits Percentage
1 Yahoo! 62,772,590 15.89%
2 AOL Websites 57,243,240 14.49%
3 MSN 47,790,317 12.10%
4 Microsoft 39,668,640 10.04%
5 Lycos 31,161,092 7.89%
6 Excite@Home 27,502,376 6.96%
7 GO Network 22,916,897 5.80%
8 AltaVista 16,246,444 4.11%
9 NBC Internet 15,007,333 3.80%
10 About.com 14,690,343 3.72%
11 Time Warner 14,312,818 3.62%
12 Amazon 13,527,874 3.43%
13 eUniverse Network11,010,023 2.79%
14 Real Networks 10,663,603 2.70%
15 eBay 10,460,407 2.65%
Yahoo was dominant, Alta Vista -- remember Alta Vista, the best search engine since sliced bread in its prime -- was still in the running, and eBay had begun its ascent up the visits charts.
In an ideal world, where the digital divide is fully bridged, and where well-designed and well-promoted governmental sites are used by aware and responsible citizens, perhaps there would be representation in a list such as this.
Eight Years Later
What has happened in the last eight years?
We know that bandwidth usage has ten-folded during this period, and we know that the Internet population has exploded, but with all this Interbahn available, where are we going?
This snapshot, taken
by Hitswise for the week of July 14 through July 20, 2008 shows an interesting reversal:
Category Visits Percentage
E-mail 16,331,232,000 38.07%
Portals & Search Engines 5,721,255,000 13.34%
General Community 5,529,572,000 12.89%
General/National News 3,229,990,000 7.53%
Entertainment 1,990,289,000 4.64%
Finance 1,900,352,000 4.43%
Shopping & Auction 991,922,000 2.31%
Local/Regional 957,136,000 2.23%
Sports & Recreation 950,730,000 2.22%
Games 785,287,000 1.83%
Other 4,512,083,000 10.52%
E-mail -- largely thanks to mammoth free e-mail providers such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google -- now outranks search engines and portals by a factor of three. Community applications, such as MySpace and FaceBook have grown into prominence, while streaming entertainment, such as Netflix instant movies, and the main television networks archived programming, is also growing in popularity; but keep in mind that one streaming movie visit to Netflix can devour 1.2 Gigabytes of bandwidth, while 100 visits to Google may use as little as 2 Megabytes all told; bandwidth usage and number of visits do not necessarily correlate.
As for the site rankings for June 2008, also courtesy of Hitswise:
Rank Website Market Share
1. www.google.com 5.92%
2. www.myspace.com 5.05%
3. mail.yahoo.com 5.00%
4. www.yahoo.com 4.09%
5. mail.live.com 2.44%
6. www.ebay.com 1.73%
7. search.yahoo.com 1.62%
8. www.msn.com 1.24%
9. www.facebook.com 1.19%
10. www.youtube.com 0.89%
11. www.gmail.com 0.69%
12. images.google.com 0.55%
13. www.wikipedia.org 0.47%
14. mail.aol.com 0.42%
15. search.msn.com 0.42%
16. address.yahoo.com 0.38%
17. www.pogo.com 0.37%
18. www.craigslist.org 0.36%
19. my.yahoo.com 0.35%
20. www.aol.com 0.34%
Free e-mail providers like mail.yahoo.com, www.gmail.com, as well as mail.aol.com, all have prominent positions. MySpace and FaceBook have become a way of life for millions now, while YouTube continues to gain in popularity. eBay is here to stay and places like Wikipedia and craigslist also show they have taken up permanent residence on our destination charts.
The Government Site
Granted, the average citizen will not have cause to visit a governmental site every single day, or several times a day (as would be the case with e-mail and search engines destinations); but the alarming point that the combined total of all federal, state, and local sites in our country only attracted 1.24% of July's visitors spell one plain truth: No matter how well designed, and how functional these sites are, they are not promoted well enough for people to actually find them and use them as a matter of course. That is as area that must not be overlooked in our effort to digitally engage our citizens.
Bandwidth
As mentioned above, the number of visits and bandwidth consumption do not necessarily correlate. Part II of this survey will examine which destinations and applications consume our bandwidth, and what the future of bandwidth usage might look like.
Stay tuned.
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho-based Ulf Wolf writes for the IT industry as Words & Images (www.words-images.com)
Photo by Hobvias Sudoneighm. Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic
