August 16, 2006

According to two different surveys released Aug. 14, Canadians are visiting business and financial Web sites more and more and the trend appears to be growing.

A Media Metrix Canada study reports that since Feb. 2006, about 5.61 million Canadians viewed a business or financial Web site from their homes. Media Metrix says that 42.94 per cent of Canadians on the Internet visited a business or financial Web site in Feb. 2001 - an increase of about 36.2 per cent over the last five years.

To be sure, Lisa Eaton, V.P. and GM at Media Metrix says that Canada remains among the leaders in usage of online financial services, and this is good news for Canadian banks and financial Web sites.

Overall, Canada ranked just behind the U.S. where 43.91 per cent of Internet users where visiting financial sites, Media Metrix reported.

Vipul Patel, director and senior analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix, said that the results indicates that Canada's traditional banks headed up the top of the list for financial sites visited and this was because Canadians had moved from just visiting sites for more information to using the Internet to manage their financial affairs.

Media Metrix says each visitor to a business or financial-related Web site spent an average of 39.3 minutes in the month on a site or about 8.6 minutes on each of five different usage days. Demographically, business and financial site visitors were more likely to be adults over the age of 35.

Business and financial site visitors were also more likely to have an annual household income greater than $100,000.

On average 13,072,041 Canadians visited Web sites or used digital media applications such as instant messaging (IM) services in the month of February remaining at a stable level versus the month of January, Media Metrix reported.

Media Metrix reported that, on an average day, 5,677,009 Canadian unique visitors were posted. In total, Canadians spent 10.62 billion minutes surfing the Internet at home in the month of Feb. 2006.

While the total number of visitors remained stable, usage intensity per visitor on the Internet decreased slightly in all measures including time spent, pages visited and usage days from the previous month.

Meanwhile, the news release service, Canada NewsWire, released their site survey analyzis Monday and reported that 72.1 per cent of 6,504 Canadians surveyed said they were interested in business news first. Rounding out the top five categories in order of importance were:

1) Investment news 50 per cent
2) High-tech news 44 per cent
3) Government news 41 per cent
4) Banks & financial services news 32 per cent

According to Canada NewsWire president and CEO Tom Enright visitors to his company's website followed the pattern of activity of the stock markets. Enright said that there are definitive traffic peaks at the opening and closing of the market and during lunch hour.

Source: IT World Canada