Comments Alex Burmaster, Internet analyst, Nielsen Online, “It's very interesting to see, particularly for advertisers, which online sectors tend to generate the longest visitor sessions. South African consumers are clearly very engaged when visiting job, dating or real estate sites. It's likely their intention is to achieve a particular objective in that visit as opposed to just being a casual look.

The appearance of blogging, just below these more ‘traditional' online sectors, highlights the increasingly important arena of consumer-generated media and how engaging person-to-person content is proving to be.”

Employment is the most engaging sector online - averaging almost 13 minutes per session. This is followed by Personals & Dating (almost 10 minutes) and Real Estate (just over nine minutes)

Most engaging sectors by average time per session: June 2008

Rank	Sector	Average session duration (min:sec)	Unique browsers (000s)
1	Employment	12:47	459
2	Personals & Dating	9:36	123
3	Real Estate	9:09	326
4	Blog	8:22	168
5	Automotive	8:02	458
6	General Classifieds	7:24	85
7	Education	7:10	6
8	Mobile	7:03	645
9	Email, Messaging & Chat	6:13	1,399
10	Healthcare	5:48	303

Source: Nielsen Online, ZA Market Intelligence, June 2008
E.g. the average session duration in the online employment sector during June 2008 was 12 minutes 47 seconds

The most engaging South African websites

Ananzi Dating is the most engaging website - averaging over 16 minutes per session. Despite being the most engaging sector, overall, there is only one employment website among the 10 most engaging websites - CareerJunction (just over 14 minutes per session). The second most engaging sector - Personals & Dating - accounts for three of the five most engaging sites.

Most engaging websites by average time per session*: June 2008

Rank	Website*	Average session duration (min:sec)	Unique browsers (000s)	Sector
1	Ananzi Dating	16:25	10	Personals & Dating
2	MWEB DatingBuzz	15:18	8	Personals & Dating
3	CareerJunction	14:13	298	Employment
4	Cosmopolitan	13:49	6	Media & Publishing
5	Sunday Times Meet & Mingle	13:19	2	Personals & Dating
6	SHAPEmag	13:07	15	Healthcare
7	Ananzi Mail	12:55	74	Email, Messaging & Chat
8	IOL Babynet	12:07	27	Healthcare
9	Auto Trader	12:02	212	Automotive
10	Hotmail	11:52	608	Email, Messaging & Chat

Source: Nielsen Online, ZA Market Intelligence, June 2008. *Min requirement = 1,000 Unique Browsers
E.g. the average session duration on Ananzi Dating during June 2008 was 16 minutes 25 seconds

“Dating sites, such as those provided by Ananzi, MWEB and the Sunday Times, might be relatively small but they do have an extremely engaged consumer base. These types of sites might not offer advertisers the biggest potential audiences but they do provide the opportunity to provide more ongoing, engaging or niche targeting campaigns. Using their own language, therefore, dating sites might describe themselves as small but perfectly formed,” concludes Burmaster.

[18 Jul 2008 08:42]

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