Welcome to UKOM's Online Market Overview for December 2024. Using UKOM endorsed data from Ipsos iris, the OMO provides a top-line snapshot of the UK population’s online behaviour across computers, tablets and smartphones.
Key insights this month include:
- Retail dominated the list of growth categories in December with greeting cards, confectionery, games and toys, fashion, beauty and grocery all increasing the most since September.
- Of the grocery retailers, Sainsbury’s was the strongest performer – its online audience increased by 3.3m Sep-Dec, a growth of 26% compared to the 6% category average. The other retailers whose online audiences went up by over 3m were Argos, M&S, John Lewis, and Currys – all high street names.
- Christmas orders and deliveries drove an uplift for the shipping category (+4.6m). Reach increased from 53% to 61% Sep-Dec with Royal Mail and Evri witnessing the largest increases.
- The smart devices category also performed well –its audience increasing by 2m with Apple Home and Amazon Alexa both adding over 1m users.
- Following the results of the US election in November, Bluesky’s audience rose rapidly from 624k in October to 2.97m in November. However the rate of growth has since slowed as in December Bluesky’s audience was 3.04m – 80% of whom also visited X. The audience to X declined by 1m Sep-Dec from 22.8m to 21.8m
- TikTok’s audience continues to grow – 28.5m used the app or website in December, a reach of 57%. The 55+ age group has the lowest reach (40%) but is once again the fastest growing audience. CapCut, the video editing app also owned by ByteDance has doubled its audience since Sept, with nearly half its users aged 15-24.
- Amazon’s broadcasting rights to the Premier League came to an end in December 2024. On Thursday 26th December, its Prime Video app had its highest audience of the month at 1.96m – more than double the 940K the Thursday before.
- Finally, this month another Chinese app Xiaohongshu, known as RedNote in the UK started attracting column inches – latest top-line data shows that its daily audience increased from 30K on 12th Jan to 466K on the 19th – the day which TikTok was temporarily banned in the US!
For more information on the UK online market including the top online brands and apps and how usage varies by audience and device, please read or download the whole report below.
More information on Ipsos iris here.
