June 2023 Digital Market Overview

Welcome to the June 2023 Digital Market Overview. Using UKOM endorsed data from Ipsos iris, the DMO provides a top-line snapshot of the UK population’s online behaviour across pcs, tablets and smartphones.

DMO June 2023 chart

Key insights this month include:

June 22nd is the date which attracted the biggest audience to the ‘General News’ category. This was the day that OceanGate confirmed its submersible had imploded at the Titanic site. The month before, the category had its biggest audience on 6th May – the day of the King’s coronation.
After only launching in the UK in April, Temu has attracted considerable interest. In June 2023, the Chinese retailer had an online audience of 18.3 million, outperforming many well-known high street names including Asda, Boots, and M&S. 10.6 million people also visited Temu’s rival, Shein, in June 2023 - an increase of 1.1m since April. A comparison of fresco segments and demographic profiles for the two Chinese retailers shows that whilst they both attract constrained parents, Shein’s audience is heavily skewed towards young females, whilst Temu’s is broad. It will be interesting to see in the coming months how Temu’s audience changes – will it continue to be high or are people just exploring the new bargain shopping brand?
Another new online service attracting people is Monopoly Go! which was launched by Scopely in April. In June, the gaming app had an audience of 1.1million.
Music festivals and gigs drove audiences to the events and ticketing categories in June. The Glastonbury Festival website had almost 2 million visitors and English Heritage Trust had over 1 million. The announcement of her forthcoming tour resulted in a registration frenzy at the Taylor Swift website on 20th June whilst 856K people went to Ticketmaster that day looking for information, compared to only 424K the day before. Unsurprisingly, of all the retail categories, Ticketing grew most between April and June, adding 1.9 million visitors.
BBC iPlayer also benefitted from major music events. On the Glastonbury weekend, audiences were much higher than average. Sunday 26th June attracted the largest audience in the month for both BBC iPlayer’s website and mobile app – the combined audience was over 3 million on the last day of the festival.
In May the Eurovision Song Contest contributed to an uplift for both audience and time on BBC iPlayer. Daypart analysis shows that during the 8-midnight slot when the show was aired, time spent on the app was more than double the May average. New diversity questions on sexual orientation showed that on the day of Eurovision, the share of BBC iPlayer’s audience identifying as LGB increased to 16% compared to a monthly average of just 9%.
Both the sports and gambling categories had a much lower audience in June than April. This was in part due to major events in April driving a peak including the World Snooker Championship, London Marathan, Grand National and the Premier league. However, not all sports declined – both tennis and cricket added audience – unsurprisingly given the start of the Ashes and Wimbledon.
The announcement in June of more bank closures may not be received well by the over 75s. Latest establishment survey numbers from PAMCo and Ipsos iris data shows that 40% of over 75s still don’t use the internet and of those who do, 9% did not visit online banking services in June. That equates to over 2.7 million elderly people who don’t currently bank online. Look out for further insight into this in the coming weeks.