Thursday, March 15, 2001

Yahoo.com, MSN.com Top European Web Destinations

According to Alexa Research, a leading web intelligence and traffic measurement organization, the top five Web sites viewed by European Internet users in February were all U.S.-based: yahoo.com, msn.com, google.com, altavista.com and microsoft.com. Traffic to yahoo.com and msn.com dwarfed that of their competitors, as each site drew an estimated three billion pageviews, compared to an estimated 643 million pageviews for google.com, 565 million for altavista.com and 497 million for microsoft.com. Rounding out the Top 20 sites for European Internet users were ebay.de, web.de, t-online.de, geocities.com, terra.es, gmx.de, lycos.de, msn.co.uk, witch.de, freeserve.com, passport.com, spray.se, onet.pl, iol.it and aol.com.

“The top destinations for Europeans online are portals and search engines, whether based in Europe or the United States,” said Marc Engel, Lead Analyst for Alexa Research. “Fifteen of the 20 sites with the most traffic were portals and/or search engines. Yahoo! and Microsoft have done a particuarly effective job of establishing a strong brand in Europe. In addition to msn.com, MSN sites based in twelve European countries were among the top 1,000 sites viewed by Europeans.”

Among sites based in Europe, German sites were the most popular destinations for European Internet users as a whole. Eight of the top 20—including five of the top six—European-based sites in February were based in Germany: ebay.de (1), web.de (2), t-online.de (3), gmx.de (5), lycos.de (6), witch.de (8), freenet.de (16) and msn.de (18).

Five of the top 20 were based in the U.K.: msn.co.uk (7), freeserve.com (9), bbc.co.uk (15), ask.co.uk (17) and lycos.co.uk (20). France and Italy each had two sites among the top 20: wanadoo.fr (13) and free.fr (19), and iol.it (12) and virgilio.it (14). Spain (terra.es) (4), Sweden (spray.se) (10) and Poland (onet.pl) (11) were each home to one of the 20 leading European-based sites viewed by European Internet users in February .

Yankee Group's "Best Online Retailers" List
The Yankee Group's Online Retail Strategies Planning Service has just released its list of the top online retailers, which the firm calls the "Yankee Group Stars." These firms are the online retailers that received a perfect ranking of seven out of seven stars in the Yankee Group's examination of firms' business models and execution on the "Seven Key Factors for Success in Online Retailing."

According to the upcoming Report, titled "Winners in Online Retailing: The Seven Yankee Group Stars" the selected companies are (in alphabetical order):

· Chadwicks.com
· CrateandBarrel.com
· FragranceNet.com
· JCPenney.com
· LandsEnd.com
· SharperImage.com
· Target.com

"The Yankee Group Stars are the winners of the 2000 holiday season, and are firms we believe are well positioned for success in 2001 and beyond," according to Paul Ritter, director of the Online Retail Strategies Planning Service. "Executing effectively on our seven success factors simultaneously is not an easy task, but these firms have done an impressive job in each area. Success in our minds means operating well on all aspects of a sound business plan that leverages the Internet as a sales channel."

Christine Loeber, program manager at the Yankee Group said, "We examined a large number of online retailers over the past several months to see how they are executing on our seven key factors for success. The firms that achieved seven stars are those that understand the issues of implementing an online business model that goes far beyond generating lots of visitors to their Web site."

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