THE NUMBER of internet users in Slovakia and the range of their online activities continue to increase according to a new wave of online audience monitoring started earlier this year.
The first results of a new assessment made by AIMmonitor, which measures the online audience of websites belonging to members of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Slovakia (IAB Slovakia) as well as other participating advertising media on the internet, found that the number of so-called real users who visited websites in January 2012 exceeded 2.5 million and the number of viewed pages reached almost 1.7 billion. The AIMmonitor also noted a significant increase in the number of mobile page views in January which increased by 15.9 million, or over 20 percent, to 92.5 million, according to a March 2 press release prepared by Gemius Slovakia, the local partner in the project.
The data from AIMmonitor indicate that Slovak internet users, on average, spent 10 hours six minutes visiting sites measured by the monitor during the month of January. This was nearly 11 percent more than in December but was 40 minutes less than in January 2011, which registered very high visit rates and online time.
The data also showed that Slovaks access the internet more during working days than on weekends and the difference accounted for almost 300,000 real users.
Among various categories measured by AIMmonitor, news websites were the most popular with 1.93 million real users. Other popular categories included ‘services, maps and timetables’, ‘dating services, communities, chats and blogs’ and ‘women and moms’. The categories ‘work and education’ and ‘news’ registered the largest increases in real users, by 140,000 and 120,000, respectively.
The total size of the Slovak online population, defined as users living in Slovakia who accessed the internet at least once in a month, totalled 2.7 million persons. Compared with January 2011 this was an increase of over 200,000 users. The gender composition of the Slovak online population was nearly equal with men accounting for 50.27 percent of users.
Internet users from age 20 to 29 were the most numerous group of the Slovak online audience, accounting for 26.88 percent, while those from age 30 to 39 accounted for 25.28 percent.
IAB Slovakia, the successor to the Association of Internet Media (AIM), last year selected Gemius, a leading internet research agency, as the official provider of internet audience measurement services in Slovakia. The first wave of internet usage measurements started on January 1 this year in cooperation with Mediaresearch Slovakia and the assessments will continue for the next three years.
