Internet Citizens 2015 Published: December 2015 Introduction • This report provides an update to our 2014 Internet Citizens publication and gives an overview of people’s online use of services and content in a range of citizen-orientated areas. Alongside this slide pack there is a written executive summary. • Ofcom has a principal duty to further the interests of citizens, and this includes seeking to ensure that people have access to the services and content they need in order to participate fully in society. This report provides an overview of people’s online use of such services and content in selected areas. • As in 2014, we have focused on a number of core topics to provide a breadth of comparative analysis. These include: government services, health information, education, public service broadcasters and news organisations, citizen journalism and arts and cultural organisations and activities. It is challenging to create a fully comprehensive and universally-accepted list of online citizen-related content and services. We do not claim such comprehensiveness here and welcome feedback on what else might be included. Nonetheless, we have selected some core categories that, taken together, can be seen to represent a landscape of broadly citizen-orientated content and services that enable participation in society. • It should be noted that the report focuses largely on the more mainstream or major providers of this type of content. This is in large part because measuring smaller, grassroots citizen initiatives is by definition more difficult. Despite their potentially limited scale, we note that these grassroots providers may nevertheless generate significant value to citizens. 1 Sources • We draw from a range of data sources – in particular comScore, the online measurement system. We have used ComScore’s multi-platform data (MMX-MP) in order to capture internet activity across mobiles and tablets as well as desktops and laptops. Data are de-duplicated to provide information on the number of individual users, regardless of whether those users are accessing websites across multiple devices or from multiple browsers. Due to methodological changes in the way that consumption on mobile devices is measured we focus on data from the first half of 2015, and predominantly from June 2015. These changes also mean it is not possible to compare comScore data with that in the 2014 report. • We also draw on a range of other data sources: – Ofcom: Adults’ media use and attitudes report http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media- literacy/media-lit-10years/2015_Adults_media_use_and_attitudes_report.pdf – UK Government: data on UK government websites www.gov.uk/performance with additional material from the Cabinet Office – Scottish Government: data on Scottish Government websites recorded by Google Analytics and provided by Scottish Government – Wales Government: data on Welsh Government websites provided by Welsh Government. – Northern Ireland Government: data on Northern Ireland Government websites recorded by Google Analytics and WebTrends and provided by NI Government. – DCMS: Taking Part Survey – data on participation in digital cultural activities in England https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/476156/Taking_Part_201415_Focus_o n_Digital_engagement.pdf – Office for National Statistics (ONS): Internet Access – Households and Individuals 2015 – data on online activities of people in Britain http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_412758.pdf – Digital R&D Fund for the Arts: data on the online activities of a range of arts and cultural organisations in England http://artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/features/digitalculture2014/ – Local Web List: directory of hyperlocal websites available at http://localweblist.net/ 2 comScore Methodology • The UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM) was formed in 2009 with a mandate from the advertising industry to establish measurement standards for digital media. In 2011, comScore was appointed the sole data supplier for UKOM under a three-year contract from January 2013. comScore MMX MP™ uses comScore MMX Multi-Platform to analyse website and app use across laptop/desktop computers, mobiles and tablets. The digital audience is an unduplicated unique audience between each of these devices, and the unique viewers of videos on laptop/desktop computers. Its methodology combines internet traffic, captured from a panel of internet users, with website interaction data from website publishers, in order to provide a projection of which websites people are visiting and how long they are spending browsing web pages. This is comScore’s Unified Digital Measurement™ (UDM) methodology. • Throughout this report web entities are followed by a letter in square brackets e.g. [C]. This letter designates where in a ‘hierarchy’ of web entities a particular entity sits. This hierarchy is comScore’s dictionary. A property [P] is the legal parent of any web entities that sit within it, such as a media title [M], channel [C], or group [G]. How the entities of a property are defined in comScore’s dictionary is determined by the properties themselves. As such, while there are similarities between different entities at a similar dictionary level, they are not always equivalent. • The comScore metrics used in this report are: – Unique audience: the total number of unique persons who have visited a website or used an application at least once in a given month. Persons visiting the same website more than once are therefore counted only once in this measure – Active reach (%): the unique audience of a website as a proportion of the total number of people who visited any website, or used any internet-connected application, at least once in a given month (the active audience). – Time spent per month: the average time spent browsing a website per unique visitor per month (excludes time spent watching online video and listening to streamed audio). 3 Contents Section Contents Slide number 1 Government and politics 5 2 Health information 19 3 Education 24 Media – public service broadcasting, news, citizen 4 30 journalism (including blogging) and hyperlocal Culture – heritage, arts, archives, museums, galleries 5 38 and libraries 4 1 Government and politics This series of slides show a range of data from the data services departments of the UK and devolved governments. Given the different types of government service site, and the different types of metrics provided here, including variation in the time periods used, it is not possible to compare these figures across the nations. 5 GOV.UK Figure 1.1: Visitors to GOV.UK by device, Jan-June 2015 According to the performance statistics of GOV.UK, it received nearly 48 million unique visits in June 2015. Of these, 27 million accessed it via a desktop, 14 million via a mobile, and nearly 6 million by a tablet. These numbers are high – representing indeed around the number of active internet users in the UK – but the figures include overseas visitors, and the data isn’t “de-duplicated”, so that people that access from different devices will be counted multiple times. Unique visitors (millions) 60.0 50.0 47.67 44.01 41.61 41.66 42.41 5.86 38.99 5.72 40.0 5.44 5.25 5.27 5.15 14.35 12.81 30.0 10.88 12.77 12.83 Tablet 10.62 Mobile Desktop 20.0 27.46 25.28 23.22 25.49 23.64 24.31 10.0 0.0 Jan-15 Feb March April May June Source: www..gov.uk/performance with additional data from the Cabinet Office. 6 GOV.UK Figure 1.2: Top ten UK ministerial departments by visitors, June 2015 The Foreign Office was the most-visited ministerial department in June 2015 by a considerable margin. The Department for Education was visited by 0.82 million, and the Department for Work and Pensions by 0.7 million 1.4 Users(millions) 1.26 1.2 1.0 0.82 0.8 0.70 0.63 0.6 0.44 0.43 0.40 0.38 0.4 0.34 0.31 0.26 0.2 - Foreign DfE DWP Home CO BIS Defra MoD DfT DCLG HMT Office Office Source: www..gov.uk/performance with additional data from the Cabinet Office. Note: Data collected between June 2nd and June 30th 2015. This data covers only department and policy content found on /government and /guidance URLs. Mainstream content, that with a wider appeal such as services and information like 'next Bank Holiday' for example, is not included. In cases where multiple departments share content, visitors who access that content will only be recorded for one department only; consequently, some departments’ number of visitors may be undercounted. 7 GOV.UK Figure 1.3: Top ten home pages on GOV.UK, June 2015 In June 2015, the job search home page was the most-viewed, with 4.5 million unique page views. The vehicle tax home page was next, with 3.9 million unique page views, followed by the HMRC home page with 3 million unique page views. Rank Page Unique page views 1. /jobsearch 4,542,018 2. /vehicle-tax 3,867,455 3. /government/organisations/hm-revenue-customs 3,002,088 4. /government/organisations/companies-house 2,000,602 5. /view-driving-licence 1,791,574 6. /get-information-about-a-company 1,614,367 7. /browse/driving 1,601,765 8. /log-in-register-hmrc-online-services 1,527,654 9. /check-vehicle-tax 1,520,022 10. /browse/visas-immigration 1,454,912 Source: www..gov.uk/performance with additional data from the Cabinet Office Note: this data covers only department and policy content found on /government and /guidance URLs; mainstream content with a wider appeal (such as information like 'next Bank Holiday‘) is not included. In cases where content is shared between multiple departments, only one of the departments will have been recorded as having received a page view. 8 GOV.SCOT Figure 1.4: Key metrics for GOV.SCOT, Jan-June 2015 www.gov.scot covers the responsibilities of the Scottish Government including health, education, justice, rural affairs, housing and the environment.