Hitwise demographic data
There are differences between visitors to the leading three search engines.- The most predominant demographic for Google users is male (53.42%) aged 35-44 (25.26%) earning an annual household income between $60,000 - $100,000.
- Both Yahoo! Search and MSN Search capture more of the lower income demographic of $30,000 - $60,000 annual household income. Yahoo! Search stands out in the younger age demographic of 25-34 (25.99%), while MSN Search is stronger with females (54.26%).
MSN Search has the highest percentage of downstream visits to the lucrative categories of Shopping and Classifieds, Business and Finance, and Travel. Google, given its genesis in higher education and its strong news service dominates the Education and News and Media categories, while Yahoo! dominates the Entertainment category.
The report concludes that 2004 brings the potential for a new type of disintermediation, the removal of search engines ("the middleman") between the end user and vertical search engines.
The study finds strong growth in market share of visits by three of the leading shopping search sites; Bizrate , NexTag, and Shopping.com. While these leading shopping search sites have experienced astronomical growth during the period of August 2003 to April 2004, the percentage of visits driven from search engines has decreased. The combination of overall strong growth and decreased visits driven from search indicates that users are going direct or finding other routes to comparison shopping sites.
posted by Jen @ 8:07 AM
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