Online auction house Ebay has secured it highest ever traffic figures and stretched its lead over the Google search engine, MSN, Yahoo and the BBC Online.

The phenomenal growth of Ebay in the UK has seen the number of pages viewed by users increase by 44% year-on-year in July 2005 to 3.1 million, almost 1.3 million higher than Google.The figures for UK web traffic, released by Nielsen NetRatings, also showed that the number of unique audience visiting Ebay has increased by 30% over the same period to 10.5 million, ahead of Google, Microsoft, MSN and Yahoo! in terms of growth.Alex Burmaster says “The majority of total time spent on Ebay in the UK is accounted for by a minority of users - indicating that for this group Ebay is very much a regular habit, indeed, they average almost seven hours per month.“However, with 43% of people staying for less than 15 minutes per month the most likely visitor is someone having a cursory look through the site.”The advantage for advertisers, Nielsen said, is the number of users spending significant lengths of time of the site.Around 22% of users average nearly seven hours a month on the site, while so-called light users spend around five minutes per month.

Posted: 08|23|05 at 8:27 am. Filed under: UK News.