5. Top Sites

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Top sites. Source: ABC Electronic www.abce.org.uk

What are Ireland’s top websites? A simple question but one that will elicit a variety of different responses and many claims that cannot be substantiated.

The reality is that there is no single, credible source to identify the most highly trafficked sites across all categories – informational, transactional and those from both public and private sectors.

Sites which rely on advertising revenue have a vested interest in publishing data about their performance. But even for those revenue-hungry sites there are gaps.

Thus far in 2007 only seven Irish websites have had their traffic independently validated by ABC Electronic. The audit periods vary, so the numbers are not directly comparable.

The figures show that of the seven with 2007 ABC Electronic audit certificates, RTE.ie at 1.56 million has the highest number of unique users, a term which describes a site’s audience.

But when it comes to how much site content is accessed by its users, Daft.ie leads the way. It can be considered to be the “stickiest” site, with more pages (as measured by page impressions) being accessed per user than the other sites.

The absence of a good qualitative measure for online advertising is currently being addressed by the Joint National Internet Research. See back page for more details.

Back to contents of State of the Net issue 7