German internet audience continues to grow

The latest survey of the German Internet scene by the independent digital measurement company comScore, Inc., ranks the largest and fastest-growing Internet properties in the country during the past year, and reports that the total German Internet audience in January 2009 grew 11 percent compared to January 2008, reaching a total of some 37.6 million visitors.
From a total German Internet audience of 37 646 000 in January 2009, online gambling was positioned tenth on the most popular activity list with 7 702 000 visitors – an increase of 23 percent over January 2008 despite the difficult economic conditions that have emerged since the beginning of 2008.
Amongst the fastest growing site categories were multimedia (up 36 percent to 23.8 million visitors), social networking (up 36 percent to 23.6 million visitors), entertainment (up 30 percent to 29.2 million visitors), and instant messengers (up 25 percent to 19.4 million visitors).
Social networking sites, Yasni.de and Facebook.com were Germany’s fastest gaining properties during the period, followed by avatar-based social-gaming site, Pennergame.de.
Elsewhere, there were gains for the weather, shipping, news/information and gambling categories, while continued traction for the Firefox Web browser helped the Mozilla Organisation grow 72 percent to 7.2 million visitors over the same period.
Several properties made notable gains in the Top 25 Property ranking, most notably ProSiebenSat1 Sites, which ascended seven places to #3, primarily from Web traffic acquisitions, including Billiger.de and Wer-Weiss-Was.de. Other properties that gained in the ranking include Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck (up eight spots to #10), Axel Springer AG (up seven spots to #14) and Hubert Burda Media (up 17 spots to #15).
See the full study at http://www.comscore.com

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