EBay has increased its lead over Google as the most viewed website in the UK, with almost half of all internet users in the country visiting the site at least once a month.
Figures published this week show that almost 3.1m pages were visited on eBay in July this year, a 44% rise on the same time last year. The site also recorded a 30% rise in the number of unique visitors, up to 10.9m.
Internet research firm Nielsen//NetRatings found that one in 10 of the entire UK population visits eBay’s home and fashion pages, showing that the website is bucking the downward trend being felt by high street clothing retailers.
Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings, said: “For many people eBay represents, more than any other brand, the greatest attributes about the internet — empowering and bringing people with complementary interests together.
“The potential of the web to provide a virtual marketplace matching individual supply and demand has been realised brilliantly by eBay, particularly when you consider that the site is visited each month by almost half of the entire UK internet population,” he said.
Search engine Google was the second most viewed website in the UK with 1.7m page views in July last year, a rise of 33% on last year’s figure. MSN, Yahoo! and BBC came in third, fourth and fifth respectively, with the BBC reporting the biggest rise in pages viewed, up 73% to 787,000 in July.
In terms of unique visitor numbers, Google was number one with 16.1m individuals hitting its site in July, a rise of 27% on last year.
Microsoft trailed Google at number two on 16m unique visitors, while MSN was the only site in the top five to see a decline — down 1% to 15.5m, making it the third most-visited website in the UK. Yahoo! was at number four and eBay at number five.

Posted: 08|24|05 at 7:55 am. Filed under: UK News.