Yesterday I received a call from Sridhar Venkatapuram of the London Business School asking me about the online behaviour of students in the UK. I mentioned on Twitter that I was pulling a list of the 100 most popular websites amongst UK students, and received a number of requests to publish the list. Well, here it is – but first quick note on methodology.
In order to isolate a sample that consisted primarily of students I looked through the Experian Mosaic profiles to find the types that contained the highest proportion of undergraduates and post-graduates. There were two Mosaic types that particularly stuck out: E33 – Town Gown Transition (defined as “Students and academics mix with young professionals in terraces relatively close to universities”) and E34 – University Challenge (“Undergraduate students living in halls of residence or close to
Universities”). The list below consists of the 100 most visited websites (excluding university homepages) by these two Mosaic groups during the four weeks ending 23/05/2009.
The three most popular categories of websites amongst students were Social Networks, Search Engines and Webmail Services. Education – Reference ranked sixth, while Education – Institutions placed seventh. The fact that the sample was over eight times more likely than an average UK Internet user to visit the latter category reassured me that we’d picked the most relevant Mosaic groups. In fact, the Education – Institution was the category that our student sample most over indexed as visitors to. The next most over-indexed categories were: Animation & Comics, Blogs, Humour, and Education – Reference.
As you would expect, high volume websites top the list; with the positions of Google, Facebook and Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) reflecting their overall popularity amongst the UK online population. However, Google UK is still over represented in the list. In fact, there are 14 Google branded or owned properties in the top 100, all of which over-index with students. In particular, Gmail, Google Book Search UK and Google Scholar UK significantly over-index vs. the general UK population.
After Google, the next most popular online brands amongst students are the BBC and Yahoo!, each of which has nine properties in the list. Again, all of the BBC properties over-index with our sample, particularly iPlayer and the BBC Blog Network. The picture is more mixed for Yahoo!, with three of its properties over-indexing. The next two most popular brands were Microsoft (accounting for seven of the top 100) and News Corporation (six) – and again the picture is more mixed, with some properties over-indexing and some under. Combined, those five companies accounted for 45 of the top 100 sites visited by UK students.
Other key insights from the list:
· 26 of the sites are entertainment focussed, with online video and TV particularly well represented. Despite all the learning, the presence of Perez Hilton illustrates that students aren’t immune to a bit of celebrity gossip.
· There are 20 news and sports sites on the list. Fans of Paul Calf will be reassured to see the Guardian as the most popular newspaper site, although students also over index as visitors to the other popular newspaper sites as well.
· All of the main social networking sites over-index on the list, with the exception of Bebo. Twitter is most over-represented social network amongst students, ranking as the 22nd most popular website overall in our sample.
· There are eights information sites on the list, with Wikipedia, the aforementioned Google properties and Word Reference in particular over-indexing.
· There are only six retailers in the top 100. eBay UK is the most popular, but noticeably under-indexes with students. The most over-indexed are fashion retailers TopShop and ASOS.




Hopefully the list will prove interesting, or at least provoke some debate. I would be interesting to produce similar lists for other demographic groups, for example retired people, families, young professionals, etc., so please feel free to use the comments box below to suggest some other groups you might want similar information on.

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