Google most visited site by Australians

Microsoft and Nine have been claiming that their site is high on the list of ‘most visited’ web sites for years. The claim is fundamentally flawed. The ‘Nine/MSN’ web site is the default ‘home’ site for the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser and so hundreds of thousands of of Australians visit the web site every day, not because they want to, not because they chose to but because Microsoft and Nine conspired to generate data that makes their web site look a lot more popular than it genuinely is.

Yahoo’s presence on this list is brought about by the same untoward approach. A great many ‘free’ software packages install the Yahoo web site as a default home and/or search page and they do so in ways that are quite likely to trick non-computer savvy individuals into permitting that to happen.

It must be said that if the Nielsen data represented the conscious intent of the Australian public’s Internet browsing habits, Microsoft and Yahoo would not likely figure on this list at all.

This is exactly the kind of junk data that Nielsen are famous for. An advertiser making a spending decision on the basis of these figures would be making a grave error of judgement.

The same thing popped in to my head too GeoffB, the same would go for Google too though to a lesser extent

I suspect that any marketer who was making their investment decisions based on topline data such as this would have much bigger issues than a grave error of judgement.

“conscious intent”??  Seriously?!  and how does one tell that?  Do we take out people that have come from hotmail but find something interesting on the NineMSN homepage?  Or are they ok as, although they don’t have a conscious intent to visit, they have a conscious engagement post the non-conscious entrance. 
Or outdoor advertising?  Should we ignore all of that in terms of media planning because people walking down the street don’t have intention of being advertised to?
Figures like this are useful as they indicate the opportunity, not the intention.  And any good advertising circumvents a consumers natural intention NOT to buy – that’s why we have advertising – to convince.

Geoff B – you are correct for ninemsn – but who is Yahoo!7 tied to for this distribution? I think you will find there are no major software distribution deals,
People aren’t as stupid as you think – it’s easy enough to change your home page.

Q, does Hotmail and 9msn unduplicate their audience??

Everytime someone logs out of Hotmail you are defaulted to the ninemsn homepage – mmm?? If there’s 5M Australian’s using Hotmail every month all being defaulted back to the 9msn homepage – I wonder what their ‘true’ reach really is along with the IE defaults…..

Is this the same with Yahoo7 and Google??

And what about all the networks that represent global sites, some of them have a larger reach than the ones listed above, totally misleading.

this thread isn’t even remotely newsworthy, however already has enough dumb questions and statements to be shut down …

I’m with Oh Please stop it…

You’re all making me feel sad.

LMAO – some of the responses in this thread are ‘sofa king we todd it”

I think this thread reflects more poorly on the early comments than on the data. One hopes they’re not digital data gurus!

Yawn.

I think GeoffB is right – the awful NineMSN website pops up all the time, and as for Yahoo7, this is attached to Firefox upgrades – as someone else said, if you are just a regular user, you could be forgiven for accidentally installing it and suddenly stupid Yahoo is your default search engine. I think Google would be pretty up there regardless because it’s actually good, unlike any thing by Microsoft etc…

PeterM, there’s a difference between something being ‘default’ or attached to your browser, and seeing a link and consciously clicking on it because you’re interested in viewing the content. So conscious intent is easily identified.

And people going on about the thread – get a life, seriously, don’t you have anything better to do? Don’t read it if you’ve got nothing to contribute!

I don’t understand why no one’s talking about the most shocking statistic … 1.9 million Australian internet users that DON’T use Google?!

I love it when the comments are more interesting than the article, he he he, keep ’em coming. The “sofa king” one brought back so many memories I nearly vomited milk through my nose.