Welcome to the September 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.
Key insights this month include:
- September 18th was the day that attracted the biggest audience to the online newspaper category. This was the Monday after the Russell Brand story broke. The Sunday Times saw its time online peak on the day of the exclusive (17th).
- Channel 4 also benefitted from the Russell Brand story, however, the broadcaster had its highest online minutes for the month on the day a new series of The Great British Bake Off aired (26/9). Total minutes on the platform that day were double the month average as 0.9 million people spent on average 30 mins viewing content across PCs and mobile devices.
- The category which experienced the most growth between June and September was Sport. This was primarily due to the Rugby World Cup which started on 8th September The audience of the rugby category went up by 5.8 million between June and September. The start of the football season also drove audiences to the Premier League online (+1.4m) and CaughtOffside (+1.3m)
- After experiencing rapid growth between April and July, Temu’s audience decreased slightly in both August and September. However, the average time the 20 million visitors spent using the brand went up from 42 minutes per person in June to 107 monthly minutes in September.
- Another Chinese brand to decrease slightly between June and September is Shein, which lost 1.6 million visitors and was overtaken by Vinted as the no.1 fashion, style and beauty retailer for online audience size. 10.9 million people visited Vinted online in September.
- In the SVOD category, Disney+ continues to grow and its audience overtook Amazon Prime Video in September as both platforms announced they plan to follow Netflix by introducing ads in their programming. Disney was the brand which added the biggest audience between June and September (+2.2 million) with the Disney+ app (+1.7m) contributing most to the increase.
- In July, the launch of the Barbie movie led to a big increase in the cinema category. The category audience on 22nd July – the Saturday of the launch weekend – was 1.6 million compared to a July average of 954K.
- Finally, GB News has been in the news a lot lately and this month, it was announced that Boris Johnson will be joining the broadcaster. Latest data shows that GB News had 6.2 million online visitors in September – that’s 12% of the UK online population. Boris Johnson would appear a good fit for viewers as the GB News online audience is more likely than average to be 55+, male and heterosexual.
You can find more information on Ipsos iris here
