Overview of European Internet usage in September 2011

Amongst its findings, the study showed strong growth in September 2011 for the career services and development category with a 14% increase in unique visitors from the previous month.

Career services and development sites received largest number of unique visitors to date

In September 2011, nearly 30% of the European online audience (108.4 million unique people) visited sites in the career services and development category, reflecting the most unique visitors the category has seen to date. Within the category, the training and education sub-category experienced the highest growth with a 28% increase, followed by Job Search with a 21% increase.

Among the top career services and development sites for September 2011, Monster Inc. received the most unique visitors at 9.4 million unique people. Indeed.com followed, with 8.3 million unique visitors, reflecting a sizeable 39% growth from the previous month. Jobrapido, an aggregator of listings from other job sites, ranked third, drawing 7.7 million visitors in September. The fourth largest site in the career services and development category was Espace Emploi International, a site for French companies and French nationals listing international vacancies, which attracted nearly 5 million unique visitors in September 2011.

Fastest growing properties in Europe

Google Sites continued to rank as the top European web property in September with 341.1 million unique visitors, reaching more than 91% of the total European Internet audience. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 263.3 million visitors (70.5% reach), followed closely by Facebook.com in third place with 250 million visitors (66.9% reach). Russian social network VKontakte continued to display the highest average engagement among top properties, with Europeans spending 427 minutes (7.1 hours) on the site.

Among the fastest growing properties in Europe from the August to September were the Dublin-based digital media company Populis (up 44%), Czech portal Seznam.cz (up 25%), and gaming site EA Online (up 16%). Italian telecommunications operator Wind Telecomunicazioni and the Mozilla Organisation also showed substantial increases in traffic of 15% and 14%, respectively.

European Internet usage by country - Russia overtakes Germany

Below is a snapshot of European Internet usage in the 18 reportable markets for which comScore provides individual reporting. In September 2011, Russia overtook Germany as the market with the highest number of unique visitors online. The UK showed the highest engagement, with users spending an average of nearly 36 hours online in September.